Altcoins currently offer the most asymmetric returns since the bear market of 2022/2023, and institutional capital and smart money are not waiting — and the reason why crypto is up today will shock investors.
Sovereign wealth funds are piling into BTC, institutions are bidding altcoins to infinity, and even Wall Street is ripping with fresh hopes for a trade war de-escalation. In a time as old as time, retail investors sold at the bottom, and now a vicious V-shaped reversal is unfolding.
Is this the return of the ‘fabled golden bull run’? All indicators are flashing ‘yes.’ Here’s why crypto is going up this week, and these are the best cryptos to buy now.
The decoupling narrative: Why crypto is up today
Bitcoin did a marvellous thing throughout the tariff FUD. It decoupled from the Nasdaq and started to trade like gold. And while prices may have been down, teams have been shipping, and an enormous structural shift is taking place in crypto.
Institutions are buying the lows like professionals, regulatory clarity is improving, and crypto is coming into its own as a true alternative financial system. But there’s a twist. The biggest winners this cycle will not be the usual suspects.
They are the projects solving real problems, and investors who want to maximize their profits this cycle need to identify the protocols defining the next phase of adoption early—time to look at four projects that are undervalued, underrated, and quietly building the future.
While retail chases the obvious plays, these projects are solving existential problems for crypto: unlocking Bitcoin’s nearly $2 trillion in dormant capital, turning memes into yield-bearing assets, and democratizing venture capital. These are financial primitives in the making. And if history rhymes, these will be the biggest winners this year.
Bitcoin Pepe: Bitcoin’s newest meme layer
Bitcoin Pepe is about to turn Bitcoin into the home of meme coins—and the implications are staggering. For years, Bitcoin has been seen as the “boomer chain”—secure, slow, and conservative. But BPEP is changing that. By building a highly scalable Layer 2 optimized for memes, it’s turning Bitcoin into the frontier of high-octane trading–it’s building ‘Solana on Bitcoin.’
The reason this matters is simple: there is nearly $2 trillion in dormant BTC capital sitting idle. Bitcoin Pepe’s native bridge unlocks it for meme trading—instantly creating the largest liquidity pool in crypto. Previous meme experiments on Bitcoin, like BRC-20s, had dreadful UX and simply did not live up to the trading experience that retail knows and loves. Bitcoin Pepe fixes this with instant swaps, low fees, and a seamless trading experience.
The meme supercycle is coming home to BTC. If Solana and Base can dominate meme trading, why not the most secure chain in the world? Bitcoin Pepe’s PEP-20 token standard enables native meme coin creation on Bitcoin, combining Solana-speed transactions with crypto’s best security.
Bitcoin Pepe’s presale has already raised $6.8m as investors practically fall over each other to get an early allocation. Set to launch later this year and still available for just $0.031, this is an altcoin that could redefine Bitcoin’s role in crypto.
PepeX: The NASDAQ 2.0 for retail investors
PepeX is letting anyone fund the next billion-dollar startup. This is a permissionless marketplace where anyone can tokenize an idea, raise capital, and let AI scale it—no VCs, no gatekeepers, just raw AI functionality meeting open market demand.
Retail is now the VC. No more waiting for private rounds—PepeX gives everyone equal access to early-stage upside. One-click tokenization means a farmer in Ghana can tokenize a new irrigation system, or a teen in Tokyo can launch an AI anime studio—all with liquidity in seconds. The 5/95 model ensures fairness by capping founders’ supply at 5%, with PepeX absorbing liquidity if they abandon the project.
PepeX’s AKIRA AI Growth Engine autonomously markets and scales projects, and the upside for this project has no theoretical cap. All services are paid in PEPX, and this could quickly become a pivotal player in the emerging tokenization narrative. The presale has already raised $1.4m, and demand continues to skyrocket.
PEPX is massively undervalued at $0.0243 and is poised to be a significant winner in the new, unburdened regulatory environment.
CartelFi: Turning Memes into yield machines
CartelFi makes it possible to earn yield on meme coins without selling a single token. It’s the first protocol that allows degens to stake their memes for explosive APYs while maintaining 100% price exposure.
Meme coins are currently idle capital, and CartelFi turns them into productive assets—a massive efficiency upgrade for crypto’s favorite asset class. The protocol’s hyper-deflationary model ensures what the team calls ‘programmed scarcity,’ with up to 100% of platform fees funding buybacks and burns, aggressively reducing the total supply of CARTFI towards zero. And the laws of supply and demand dictate that a lower supply commands a higher price.
CartelFi’s specialized meme liquidity pools feature dynamic yield optimization and are a massive technical evolution for liquidity provision. Could this become Uniswap’s biggest rival? With a price of just $0.0352, investors are very, very early to the CartelFi trade.
Popcat: The return of cat season?
It is no secret that in the trending risk on markets, meme coins perform well, and the leader has been Popcat. A fan-favorite meme coin on Solana and one of the few that has survived numerous significant drawdowns while the community has remained intact.
Popcat has clawed its way back to the top of Solana’s meme coin hierarchy, and when retail investors return to markets, they flock to assets that they remember. Popcat has undergone various bursts of virality, and in bull markets, attention is capital. And the popping cat appears to be preparing for another parabolic leg.
Why is crypto going up this week?
The de-escalation of the tariff war cleared a massive macro overhang, and when investors want to risk on again, they pick the fastest horse: crypto. Institutions are wasting no time in joining this rally, and SOL Strategies has recently raised $500 million in convertible notes, demonstrating the current level of institutional demand.
Bitcoin Pepe, PepeX, CartelFi, and Popcat are primed to rally aggressively this year. But of these projects, Bitcoin Pepe stands to be the greatest winner. Given BTC’s increasing importance as a macro asset and BPEP being the world’s first meme-centric ICO on Bitcoin, it performing superbly this year makes perfect sense.
The bull market is back, and BPEP looks like the fastest horse.