Meme coins have captured the attention of the crypto community over the last few years with meteoric rises and falls in price that traders in traditional markets could only dream of.A recent rise in Bitcoin price, perhaps spurred on in part by the rise in usage of Bitcoin Ordinals, lent the altcoin market plenty of breathing room and led to a widespread rally that has lasted around a week before cooling off slightly.

The question now is whether the meme coins will once again lie dormant or whether the rally seen so far is just the beginning of a wider and more powerful upward trend.

El Hippo (HIPP) Price Rally

HIPP is the token for a fairly new meme coin, El Hippo, characterized by a meme-loving community of over 100,000 online members. El Hippo launched in August and has already amassed a large following encouraged by regular airdrops and meme contests, with a $10,000 airdrop wrapping up earlier this month and $700 up for grabs every two weeks.

El Hippo has almost doubled in price already since August, boasting a modest market cap of $4.96 million. Small cap coins are often a subject of scrutiny for crypto traders looking for explosive growth, as only a coin with a small market cap has the capability of going 100x or 1000x. However, such growth needs to have a real catalyst, and small cap coins are also volatile and risky.Having said that, El Hippo has plenty of incentives for growth due to rewarding its community so frequently and reports that new centralized exchange listings are in the works. With frequent media coverage and an ever-expanding portfolio of viral meme content being posted online, El Hippo investors may be arriving at just the right time to see some real growth, although of course, no gains in crypto are ever guaranteed.

Pepe (PEPE) Price Rally 

PEPE is a major meme coin with a market cap of $485 million, down from $1.5 billion at the height of its power in 2021. The coin has seen an uptick in trading volume and price lately, reaching a new monthly high on November 11 before settling back down a little bit.

PEPE is appealing to investors for many reasons. While the large market cap doesn’t leave as much room for upward growth as it once did, the project is very well established, and has a lot of social media power behind it, the bread and butter for any meme coin. 

If the PEPE community can keep eyes on the project, it may reach the critical mass needed to enter another bull run period. PEPE price famously exploded in 2021 in one of the largest and most rapid price accumulations ever seen in the crypto market, and retail investors have not forgotten the gains that were on offer during that time period.

How to Spot Upward Trends

With meme coins, the trick to finding upward trends is to keep an eye on social media activity. Meme coins depend on viral content and community action much more than regular crypto assets, and can see major price movements in short spaces of time due to the right influencer retweeting something at the right time.

As with everything in crypto, these assets are volatile and risky, and traders should never invest more than they’re willing to lose.