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El Salvador is building an airport on the outskirts of the planned Bitcoin City. The country is designing a utopia powered by cryptocurrencies, green energy, and... foreign investments.

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El Salvador moves forward with the Bitcoin City project attracting foreign crypto businesses

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A star stock-picker and one of the most aggressive bulls of Wall Street, Cathie Wood has amassed an impressive fortune that is largely tied to the performance of exchange-traded funds managed by ARK Invest. 

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Cathie Wood Net Worth: How Rich is the ARK Invest Founder & CEO?

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While the LastPass password generator and manager have faced a history of data breaches, significantly impacting its reputation, the service continues to enjoy popularity

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The Russian government is bringing out the big guns against Bitcoin and altcoins. The restrictions on crypto trading will create a more favorable environment for the digital ruble and state-controlled digital assets.

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Russia To Ban Crypto Trading in a Bid to Eliminate CBDC Competition

Cathie Wood, a star Wall Street fund manager known for her aggressive bets on the technology and innovation sector, made quite a name for herself in the world of finance. However, the glory days of her flagship ARK Innovation fund seem to be over, as most ARK ETFs trade drastically lower over the last couple of years. As Wood's funds fail to attract investors' interest, how much is she worth now?

Cathie Wood was born in 1955 in Los Angeles to a family of Irish immigrants. The eldest child in the family, Cathie 

 in an interview that she was raised as her parents' "first-born son" and was encouraged to pursue her interests and passions regardless of gender. She attended an all-girls Catholic school, Notre Dame Academy, that she finished in 1974. Then, Wood went on to pursue a BA degree in economics and finance from the University of Southern California, graduating summa cm laude in 1981. 

Before she even graduated, Wood landed her first job in finance as an assistant economist at the Capital Group. Three years later, she accepted an offer to work as a portfolio manager for Jennison Associates, where she worked for the next 18 years. As Wood started making more connections in the industry, she met other high-ranked women economists, such as Lulu Wang, with whom she co-founded the hedge fund Tupelo Capital Management. 

In 2001, Wood signed on as a chief investment officer of AllianceBernstein, where she spent the next 12 years overseeing the $5 billion fund's global strategies. She eventually resigned after the management refused to greenlight her plan for a disruptive technology-focused fund, an idea that would later become the backbone of Wood's ARK Investment Management fund. 

After parting her way with Alliance Bernstein, Cathie Wood registered ARK as an investment adviser in January 2014, following her vision for a fund focused exclusively on disruptive innovation. The seed funding for the first four funds was provided by 

 of Archegos Capital, whose overleveraged business empire collapsed in March 2021, triggering a failure of Credit Suisse that sent shock waves across the European banking sector. 

A research team behind ARK funds is constantly on the look for investing opportunities in cutting-edge tech sectors such as robotics, AI, blockchain, genomics, fintech, and space exploration. All funds but two are actively managed, as Cathie Wood believes it allows to capitalize on rapid price movements and quickly close underperforming positions. Such an approach, however, has so far failed to deliver results that would beat the market: even though Wood's flagship ARK Innovation ETF was the top-performing fund in 2020, over the ten years ended in December 2023, it generated a 122% return, as compared to 330% yielded by Nasdaq over the same time. 

At the time of writing, ARK Invest manages eight exchange-traded 

ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ)

ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF (ARKS)

ARK Israel Innovative Technology ETF (IZRL)

The 3D Printing ETF and ARK Israel Innovative Technology ETF are index funds, while the rest are actively managed, which means that they rely on a team of professional portfolio managers to hand-pick the stocks that together could potentially outperform the market. 

Besides actively managed and indexed equity funds, ARK Invest also offers private equity and digital assets, which are products directed primarily at institutional investors. 

Cathie Wood's investment strategy revolves around identifying long-term growth trends and investing in companies that she believes are poised to benefit the most from those trends. A Wall Street darling is also a big fan of a thematic investing approach, where investments are centered around specific sectors that Wood and her team believe expect to create significant value for investors in the future, such as autonomous technology, DNA sequencing, and blockchain. 

Another noticeable trait of Wood's investing style is that she tends to have high conviction in her handpicked companies, often purchasing huge amounts of stocks that she believes have strong growth potential. This typically leads to concentrated portfolios with significant exposure to specific trends. And when the stock fails to deliver, Wood often doubles down on it by buying the dip, or, as her critics like to put it, tries to catch a falling knife, like that one time when she went on a buying spree for Coinbase shares after they fell 20 percent.  

Cathie Wood is decidedly bullish on electric cars — so when Tesla shares began to free-fall, losing more than 30 percent of value since the start of 2024, ARK Invest 

 to buy the dip. Despite the many Tesla woes, such as growing competition from other EV makers and rapid depreciation of Elon Musk's personal brand, Wood reiterated her price target of $2,000 for the company in five years — a more than 1,000% increase from today's prices.  

"Autos, in the future, will be electric," Wood recently told 

. "We believe [that] in five years, 75% to 85% of all sales will be electric."

In contrast, the average price target for the Tesla stock from 47 analysts that are tracked by S&P Global Market Intelligence is $196.64.

As if a sky-high valuation for Tesla wasn't enough to boost morals among the ARK ETFs investors, Wood recently made a huge announcement at the recent Bitcoin Investor Day event in New York, boosting her 2030 

 for Bitcoin from a hefty $1.5 million to even more mind-boggling $3.8 million.

While such an outlandish forecast should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, there's a solid foundation for Bitcoin's appreciation in the upcoming years, namely the steady inflows into the new spot Bitcoin ETFs that accumulated billions of customer assets since the landmark 

 in January. And Wood's new fund, Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB), hasn't disappointed either, growing to nearly $3 billion AUM so far. 

According to Cathie Wood, the rollout of Bitcoin spot ETFs is likely to bring average Bitcoin allocation among institutional crypto investors from the conservative 1-3% range to a more risky 5%. That alone would be enough to push Bitcoin to the $1.5 million high, she believes. 

As a founder and chief executive officer of Ark Invest, it comes as no surprise that Cathie Wood's fortune is largely dependent on the performance of her funds — after all, she reportedly owns about 50% of the company. Currently, most media outlets pin her net worth somewhere between $250 million and $300 million. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Cathie Wood has a net worth of roughly $220 million. 

Cathie Wood is a devout Christian who doesn't hesitate to bring her faith into the pragmatic world of finance, as she openly shares that her fund ARK was named after the Ark of the Covenant. Wood is a mother of three children, Caitlin, Caroline, and Robert, whom she shares with her ex-husband. She got divorced from Robert Wood in 2003, who passed away in 2018. Cathie Wood's maiden name is Duddy.

If you would like to learn more about the net worth of other finance & crypto personalities, take a look at our articles on 

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conducted by the B2B review and rating platform GoodFirms in 2023, it was found that 30% of respondents, all IT professionals, experienced data breaches directly linked to weak passwords. Additionally, Cybernews, a cybersecurity research platform, 

that "123456" was the most common password in 2023.

Despite increased awareness of the importance of strong passwords, many users still rely on predictable combinations. This issue has prompted some countries, like the United Kingdom, to take legal action. On April 29, the UK government enforced regulations under its Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (PSTI) framework, mandating strict password protocols for Internet-connected devices to encourage the use of unique, non-trivial passwords and mitigate cyber threats.

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While the UK is updating its laws to bolster its residents' defense against cyber threats, it is crucial to take personal security measures, such as creating strong and unique passwords. The LastPass password generator, a feature of the LastPass password manager, has been a popular choice for this purpose for a long time. However, after it fell victim to a cyber attack in 2022, there have been strong concerns about its reliability. 

Is the LastPass password generator and manager still effective for cryptocurrency users in 2024? Let's delve into the details.

Firstly, let's understand what LastPass offers. The team behind LastPass claims this product is a manager that can effectively secure passwords in a vault, accessible via a locally hosted file. Acting as a centralized hub for password-related tasks, LastPass facilitates auto-filling passwords, password synchronization across different devices, generating robust passwords, and monitoring their strength.

The LastPass password generator is touted to allow users to create the most secure and random passwords, aligning with security best practices. Users can access the random password generator via the LastPass icon in their web browser toolbar, browser extension, or vault. Customization options include password length and character types.

Random passwords generated by LastPass can contain up to one hundred characters and offer three modes: "Easy to say," "Easy to read," and "all characters." After selecting preferences, users can copy the password to their clipboard or generate a new one as needed. LastPass recommends logging out and back in using the new password for enhanced security.

Is the LastPass random password generator and manager free forever?

At the time of publication, LastPass did offer a free 

for one device type. According to the official website, it provides unlimited passwords, one user account, a LastPass password generator, and several useful features such as saving and auto-filling passwords, one-to-one password sharing with other LastPass users, access to a security dashboard, dark web monitoring, and passwordless login.

a thirty-day free trial for the Premium plan. Meanwhile, the Premium plan added additional functionality to the free features, including access across all types of devices, one-to-many sharing, and advanced multifactor options.

This plan also provided emergency access, which grants one-time access to your vault to another LastPass user in the event of an emergency or crisis, as well as personal customer support. Additionally, Premium customers could upgrade their secure notes storage of 50 MB from the Free plan to 1 GB. This storage can be used for backing up critical documents such as passports, credit cards, insurance cards, and tax documents.

The regular price for the Premium plan was €2.90 per month, while at press time, there was a 20% discount and the plan was priced at €2.32 per month.

LastPass also offered a special Families plan which granted all premium features to six users. This plan came with six individual, encrypted vaults and a family manager dashboard for simplified user and security management. This plan also supported grouping and sharing items in folders.

The regular price of the Family plan was €3.90, however, at press time, it was offered for €3.12.

Thus, you currently have a choice of three plans for the LastPass account you create. One of them will allow you to use the LastPass app to generate and store your passwords for free. However, free accounts are limited to the use of a single device type.

The safety of LastPass in 2024 has been a concern following security incidents in 2022 when, both the company and its customers suffered a data breach. The team behind LastPass claims its password management solution features advanced 256-bit AES encryption. However, it did not prevent the security incident from happening.

"Based on its poor track record of security problems, the short answer is that no, LastPass is not safe, and you should probably avoid it," secure email service ProtonMail recommends, adding "If you already have it installed, the safest option is to delete LastPass and to export and then delete any data the company holds so it's no longer at risk."

To better understand the trustworthiness of the LastPass solution, it is also worth exploring customer reviews. At press time, based on 673 customer reviews left on the popular review platform Trustpilot, the password management solution scored only 1.3 out of five stars, which is regarded by the service as bad. Only 7% of reviews gave LastPass five stars, whereas 79% gave it only one star.

It appears that since January 3, all reviews except one, giving the service a maximum number of stars, ranked it rather low.

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Security concerns were mentioned as one of the major issues why users were unsatisfied with LastPass. Many of them also mentioned unauthorized charges to their cards without consent. Some LastPass users also complained about the difficulty in accessing customer support.

Users also report encountering obstacles such as unreasonable requirements for assistance or outright inability to reach a customer support representative. Users found it particularly difficult to cancel their LastPass subscriptions because of hidden cancellation policies and resistance from customer service.

Performance issues and lack of updates were also experienced by many users. Moreover, there were users who voiced such significant concerns with LastPass that they were prepared to take legal action against the service, citing breaches of privacy rights and mishandling of personal information.

The best LastPass alternative to generate and secure passwords

Because of security breaches and numerous customer concerns, LastPass may not be the best random password generator and manager. Which LastPass alternative should you choose to generate secure passwords and store them?

NordPass as the "best for usability" password manager, rating this solution with 4.9 stars out of 5 based on various criteria according to reviews and fees. On Trustpilot, this service scored 4.3 out of 5 stars based on 1,406 reviews, 83% of which gave it the maximum number of stars. While the majority of the most recent reviews about NordPass were positive, there were two negative opinions emphasizing the difficulty of getting refunded after canceling the use of the service as well as the inability to turn off automated updates.

As per Forbes Advisor, this solution is free for personal and family usage, whereas business clients have to pay $1.79 per month.

Among the downsides, Forbes Advisor emphasizes that "Unlike LastPass, it does not provide a native option for one-time password (OTP) generation." Forbes Advisor also points out that "Advanced business features, such as Google Workspace SSO, are only available in the Business or Enterprise plans."

Another top suggestion of a LastPass alternative from Forbes Advisor is Norton Password Manager. Forbes Advisor rated this service at 4.8. Forbes Advisor claims this solution is the best for integrated cybersecurity solutions but points out that Norton Password Manager does not have a user-friendly interface like LastPass.

Other alternatives suggested by the Forbes Advisor experts are Keeper Password, KeePass, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane.

The LastPass password generator is certainly not the only application that can be used to create a password and store it. However, if for any reason, you do not want to use LastPass or any LastPass alternative, and prefer creating your passwords manually, it is crucial to keep in mind word and number combinations, as they can significantly compromise your security.

"In total, we were able to analyze 15,212,645,925 passwords, of which 2,217,015,490 were unique," the team behind Cybernews shared in its report adding, "We discovered some interesting things about the way that people create passwords: their favorite sports teams, cities, food, and even curse words," Cybernews claims that it is possible to distinguish demographic patterns based on the passwords chosen by users. "We could even deduce the probable age of the person by looking at which year they use in their password," it states.

It turns out that creating secure random passwords is a real challenge to many users.

Using a year as a password or its fragment is considered a rather basic approach to establishing your online security. Cybernews has found that the birth year of a user is the most popular year to be added to a password, followed by the year when the password was created, as well as any other year regarded as special by the user.

Interestingly, based on the data examined by Cybernews, using the year 2010 in the password was particularly popular in 2023. The platform reports that there were approximately 20 million passwords that incorporated this year and its variations. The second most commonly used year was 1987 with 8.4 million occurrences in passwords, followed by 1991, which was incorporated into 8.3 million passwords.

A name is another common component of a weak password. Unfortunately, millions of users still stick to using names. Based on its data, Cybernews was actually able to access the most popular names.

"The winner is Eva, but just barely. The number 2 name is Alex, which comes in about 50,000 instances less than Eva," Cybernews states, providing further statistics. "After that is Anna, and it tapers down consistently to the  number 10 most common password name, Daniel." In-between, there are such names as Max, Ava, Ella, Leo, Jack, and Ryan, whereas Darcie and Darcey did not enjoy such popularity.

Passwords including names of sports teams

Adding the name of your favorite sports team to your password is another sure way to make it rather weak. Cybernews explains that the data for sports teams incorporated by users in their passwords is so common that it can be assumed the most favorite teams and kinds of sports based on passwords only.

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Russia is ramping up efforts to clear the way for the digital ruble. Anatoly Aksakov, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market, has announced the plan to enforce stricter restrictions against crypto trading. New regulations will come into effect on September 1 this year. The clampdown is part of a broader effort to take crypto under control and shield the national currency from borderless digital assets.

Aksakov specifically pointed to “Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies” in a 

 for the news agency. The new legislation leaves space only for the digital assets issued in the Russian jurisdiction, specifically the digital ruble, the local incarnation of the central bank digital currency (CBDC).  

– The need for a ban is due to the fact that today cryptocurrency is a quasi-currency that replaces the ruble in the country. But only the Russian ruble fulfills the mission of a monetary unit, which is why this decision was made – the official explains the rationale behind the move.

The announcement follows the bill on regulating mining activities, reintroduced to the State Duma by a group of deputies led by Aksakov. The legislation proposes to outlaw “the organization of digital currency circulation in Russia,” which is a bureaucratic euphemism for crypto trading. 

In other words, running a crypto exchange business will be illegal as of September 1. Still, the exact wording of Aksakov’s statement doesn’t seem to cover peer-to-peer deals between individuals in a private capacity, even if it includes DEX-based trading.

The official openly admits that cryptocurrencies pose a threat to the Russian CBDC. The due legislation will favor digital ruble and other state-controlled digital assets, should they be issued. Crypto mining will also enjoy preferential treatment since it significantly contributes to tax revenue. 

According to numbers from Statista, cryptocurrency miners generate nearly $2.6 billion in liquidity. In December last year, the 

 put forth an innovative idea to treat crypto mined in the country as exportable goods similar to natural gas. 

The recent bill aims to establish a legal structure enabling miners to export their mined assets. Mining-related provisions have been modeled after the regulations governing natural gas exports.

Crypto trading, in the broad sense, remains legal in Russia as long as it is carried out through registered exchanges. However, traders are required to declare their transactions and pay taxes on their gains. 

So far, the Russian government has opted for regulation rather than a ban, but the recent twist suggests that things are taking a wrong turn in the eleventh-largest economy in the world. 

Simultaneously, the CBDC program has been gaining traction. The government has recently imposed 

 on large companies, with only small firms exempt from the requirements. According to initial projections, the digital ruble will become widely available by 2025.