— Meanwhile, Rover, the pet care site sometimes referred to along with its competitor Wag as the Uber of dog walking, has retained Mercury Public Affairs as its first outside lobbying firm. Mercury’s Mike McSherry, an alum of the RNC, Republican Governors’ Association and Labor Department, will lobby for Rover on tax and labor classification issues — a development that comes as the Biden administration has pledged to recognize workers dispatched by apps as employees rather than contractors. Gig companies are also facing new tax reporting requirements beginning next year, thanks to the coronavirus stimulus bill signed into law by President Joe Biden in March.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of more conventional digital finance intermediaries.

Another institutional hit for bitcoin–which probably had the most sustained effect–was the SEC’s refusal to approve a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). This would be a path for more mainstream people in finance to dabble with blockchain; it would allow investors to dip their toes in bitcoin without owning the actual asset. Not only that, but it would make bitcoin available on the most prominent financial markets. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), however, has yet to allow such a fund to exist–mostly because it is unable to monitor crypto-transactions in order to avoid market manipulation.
Ethereum gained 1.66% to $4,808 and Dogecoin was trading 4.08% higher at $0.2837. Digital token Stellar climbed 3.56% to $0.3817 and XRP rose 0.01% to $1.27.