SHINY THING$ 0178 ✨

The Tariffs ON / tariffs OFF rhetoric has been wrecking havoc with the markets and the overall sentiment in all-things investable for the past few weeks — thats obvious. As Rally continues to expand globally, many of the most intriguing assets currently IPO'ing and trading on our platform originate from international markets.

Naturally, this raises an important question for our community: "How does this impact us?"

Could Rolex watches see their values surge due to a new 31% tariff on Swiss goods? Will European supercars with limited production runs become increasingly scarce as fewer high-end vehicles reach U.S. shores? While the short answer might be, "It's too early to tell," one thing is clear: investing and collecting modern artifacts is rapidly evolving beyond mere nostalgia. Today, it's about discovery — spotting emerging trends early enough to capitalize on their momentum and making strategic bets as markets mature.

Given the rapid pace of innovation worldwide and the sheer volume of noteworthy collectibles arriving in Rally's inbox each week, this edition of Shiny Thing$ takes a closer look at the future. Specifically, we're exploring the exciting world we were promised as kids — a future that's closer now than ever before, driven by groundbreaking individuals and visionary companies around the globe.

01: Flying Cars ✈️

When talking about the future, there is no better place to start than the flying car — the poster-child for “the future” for nearly every generation over the last 100 years.

In February, seemingly out of nowhere and lost in the post-election news cycle, Alef Aeronautics shared their first official video of their flying car, Model Zero. Unlike some of the flying car concepts of the past, this actually looks like a car, and not a small plane with wheels. 

The company has been developing flying cars for about a decade. After showing a prototype to Tim Draper in 2017, an early investor in Tesla and SpaceX, he backed Alef with $3 million in seed funding (an extremely small amount of capital for a product as complex and ambitious as a flying car). In 2022, they released their first prototype, the Model A, a 100% electric flying car can drive up to 220 miles with a 110-mile flight range. It became the first vehicle of its kind to obtain a Special Airworthiness Certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration, ostensibly becoming the first ever legal flying car. Now, 3 years later, they’ve released the “first-ever video in history of a car driving and vertically taking off.”

According to Alef, the first release has 3,300 pre-orders with MSRP expected to start at around $300,000 and deliveries to begin next year.

02: Spray-On Shoes 👟

At last year’s Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri cruised to a first-place finish in 2 hours, 22 minutes, and 37 seconds. And she did so with the help of a then-secret prototype of a revolutionary footwear technology. 

The On Running Cloudboom Strike LS, a "spray on" sneaker intended to form perfectly to the feet of performance runners was officially approved by the World Athletics Organization in April of 2024 and was first previewed on Obiri’s feet during last years race. 

Now, 12 months later, the Swiss running brand is will again have a presence at the Boston Marathon, and this time the spray-on The Cloudboom Strike LS running shoe will be available top the public. From April 17th to the 22nd, the On Running Innovation pop-up on Newbury Street in Boston will be giving runners a chance to test out and buy the spray-on shoe for the first time ever. 

03: Invisibility  😶‍🌫️

As with many revolutionary innovations worldwide, for better or worse, the first use case is often lent to military and defense technology.

In February, scientists at Zhejiang University in China unveiled first-of-it’s-kind military grade “aeroamphibious invisibility cloak” which dynamically adjusts its molecular composition to blend into the background, could revolutionize warfare by potentially making military assets, like drones, invisible to radar and other surveillance technologies. 

While stealth technology has long been a staple of US manned and unmanned flight, it has relied on features like radar absorbing material design and elements like carbon fiber and graphene. The Chinese “cloak” on the other hand is achieved through a process called self-adaptive photochromism, where molecules rearrange when exposed to certain wavelengths of light, causing the material to change color and effectively become invisible.

04: Living on Mars  🛸

No one talks about Mars more than Elon Musk.

But as of March, an actual date has been set for the first human trip to the planet that seems so close, yet so far away from an inhabitable reality. In a tweet last month, Elon Musk shared that he expects to take SpaceX’s Starship to Mars for its first crewless mission late next year with Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot will on board. He went on to say “If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.”

While Musk has set and missed dates before, its worth noting that SpaceX has ramped up Starship testing dramatically in preparation for critical trips to space, and in October the company performed the first catch of the Starship’s Super Heavy booster after liftoff to demonstrate the concept that a reusable rocket is possible.

05: Servant Robots  🤖

At some point in the last year, Artificial Intelligence took a left turn and became a creative tool as opposed to the utilitarian tool we were once promised it would become — a means of taking the manual work and the less desirable to-do list off our plate, allowing us the time and freedom for more fruitful personal endeavors.

But what happened to the robots that would do all the work?

While many iRobot-esque proofs of concept have found their way into marketing videos for companies big and small, the Roomba vacuum is still the only relatively inexpensive commercially successful example of a “chore robot” to come to market. But just this fall, a startup called “Physical Intelligence” secured $400 million in funding from a group of investors that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, to back its efforts to bring household robots closer to practical reality.

In October, the company released a video of their prototype robot folding laundry, making coffee and bussing a table — the type of stuff we REALLY want from AI. The company, however, added a disclaimer in their press release that read "Winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent 'easy' problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived." 

Until the Future (next week)…