"Zhu and Davies are two ambitious young men, by all descriptions exceedingly smart, who appeared to understand the structural opportunity of digital currency rather well..."

"... that crypto is a game of creating virtual fortunes out of thin air and convincing other humans with traditional forms of money that those virtual fortunes deserve to be real-world ones. They built social-media cred by playing the part of billionaire financial geniuses, translated that to actual financial credit, then put billions of dollars in borrowed money to work in speculative investments they could cheerlead to success with their large, influential platforms. Before you know it, the pretend billionaire is a real billionaire shopping for super-yachts. They grokked the game, and the plan worked perfectly — until it didn’t."

From "The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars/Everyone trusted the two guys at Three Arrows Capital. They knew what they were doing — right?" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: I haven't seen "grok" in a while.  That's a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It's not based on any other word, just, as the OED puts it, an "arbitrary formation."

Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign.... Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers....

It means "To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with... To empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment."

It seems to have peaked in 1968, when Tom Wolfe wrote " Instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made..as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing" (in "The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test") and Playboy Magazine saw fit to write: "He met her at an acid-rock ball and she grokked him, this ultracool miss loaded with experience and bereft of emotion." 

Back then grokking had a lot to do with LSD and the music it unleashed. These days, there's grokking about the "game" of the con of cryptocurrency. What a come down!

Don't confuse "grok" with "glom," which is an older word, slang based on the Scottish slang "glaum." The OED quotes the 1914 "Vocabulary of Criminal Slang": "Glom, to grab; to snatch; to take; implying violence. Example: 'Glom this short and drop off two blocks below.'"

There's a lot more glomming than grokking these days.

(The whole time I was writing this post, I had a sneaking feeling I'd plunged into the word "grok" before, and indeed I did, just 2 years ago, complete with OED quotes from Tom Wolfe and Playboy and much more about "Stranger in a Strange Land.")