The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that we now know what the cryptocurrency titans were really up to. The Globe's Tim Kiladze writes that sometimes it was outright fraud. In others it was, at best, outlandish naivete fuelled by Silicon Valley's conceit, to "move fast and break things" -- even if that meant breaking the law. This week, the U.S. government hit Binance, the largest crypto exchange, with a $4.3-billion (U.S.) fine and laid federal charges against founder Changpeng Zhao, who is Canadian. In its statement of allegations, the Justice Department accused Mr. Zhao of prioritizing Binance's growth over compliance with U.S. law, and claimed he told employees it was "better to ask for forgiveness than permission." Mr. Zhao will likely face jail time. It is tempting to write it all off as one more COVID-19-era hallucination. Cryptocurrency prices plummeted; FTX, led by one-time wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, has collapsed; yet the industry is far from fizzling out. The price of bitcoin, the top cryptocurrency, is rebounding, up 125 per cent this year, and a number of major financial institutions, including giant BlackRock, have filed the paperwork to launch crypto exchange-traded funds in the U.S.