Mary Spanjers has a winning lottery ticket, tucked away in a drawer, uncashed. It’s an artifact of her freshman year of college seven years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She took advantage of a free offer of something strange and new: cryptocurrency. One-third of a Bitcoin, to be exact. It was worth $100.
Since then, this virtual pittance has skyrocketed in value. Before a May selloff, it could have fetched $20,000 and still trades for about 13 grand—a 13,000% return. “It’s truly remarkable,” Spanjers said of her windfall. “Most of us thought it was a bit of a joke.”
Spanjers, now a 24-year-old software engineer for oil firm Schlumberger in Houston, profited from a grand experiment, the MIT Bitcoin Project. In 2014, every undergraduate on the Cambridge, Mass., campus had the chance to claim fractional ownership of a Bitcoin, a string of code on an online ledger.
About 3,100 students grabbed the offer, which required only that they fill out long questionnaires and go over some educational handouts. They’d then set up a digital wallet, which holds the code that they could exchange for something of value, including cash.
The experiment was the brainchild of two “Bitcoin evangelists”: Dan Elitzer, then an MBA student who had just founded the school’s Bitcoin Club, and Jeremy Rubin, an undergrad computer science major. The pair sought “to take a glimpse into the future and see what's possible with this technology,” says Elitzer, now 37.
The MIT study illustrated that Bitcoin could function like an investment—or, as MIT Alum Alex Morcos, co-founder of Bitcoin researcher and developer Chaincode Labs, put it, “an asset, a store of value.” Morcos provided about $250,000—or half the money raised—to buy Bitcoin for the experiment.
Back then, the enterprise was dismissed as something of a failure. The bookstore installed a Bitcoin ATM and began accepting the new currency, but only a few dozen students ever used it. “Bitcoin Doesn’t Gain Much Currency at MIT,” a 2016 Boston Globe headline read.
After zooming to a record high of almost $65,000 in mid-April, Bitcoin has retreated to around $36,000. A spotlight on environmental risks—and the way tweets from prominent personalities drive swings in prices—have undermined the narrative that it will gain more mainstream adoption. On Friday, prices were down after a cryptic tweet from Elon Musk.
Still, the biggest believers in crypto argue the token is consolidating before a fresh run to new highs.
Today, no one knows how many of the MIT alums, still in their 20s, are nursing tidy nest eggs—or just some serious regrets. If, like Spanjers, every student had held on, their Bitcoin in May would have been worth more than $60 million.
One in ten cashed out in the first two weeks—one in four, by the time the experiment ended in mid-2017, according to Christian Catalini, an MIT associate professor in its business school who oversaw the study.
Some of the luckiest MIT grads forgot about it, as if they had found a quarter on the sidewalk and threw it in a jar. They may now have enough for a car or a house down-payment.
“Sometimes if my friends or co-workers talk about cryptocurrency, I'll be, like, ‘Oh, yeah, that's the thing I have,’” says Marilynn Bach, now an engineer at actnano Inc., a Boston area start-up that makes protective coatings.
For others, the experience introduced them to careers in a burgeoning industry. They include the study’s creators. Elitzer now runs Nascent, a crypto investment firm. Rubin helps build the technology supporting Bitcoin as chief executive officer of Judica Inc. Catalini co-created the Facebook-backed cryptocurrency Diem, formerly Libra.