This was supposed to be the final year of the bull market but has treated crypto quite badly, not that it was alone in this mess. All risk-on assets had to suffer.
But it's one thing to "suffer" from ATHs like bitcoin or stock indexes, another to be caught in a pretty weak shape, as alts have been. Gold has been doing very well due to the escalation of conflicts, so that was good news for their holders. I guess oil too for a few days, but that's mostly bad news for everyone except the producers who can sell at the higher prices, even if some investors may have speculated on its rising price.
There wasn't all bad news for crypto this year... But other than the SEC turning 180 on pretty much everything in crypto, the very good news that caught attention mostly revolved around bitcoin and stablecoins. And a few meme coins, but that trend kind of died out (which is a good thing).
If there have been good news about the rest of the market (and there surely have been some), they got mostly overshadowed by the two major domains of interest into bitcoin and stablecoins. Thus probably the state of the alts at this time.
Hopefully, alts will have a better second half of the year than the first half. Bitcoin already had a good first half and is not far from its ATH reached in May. But I wouldn't bet everything on alts. Not this time, even if there will be an alt season. The focus is too much on bitcoin and stablecoins.
Bitcoin dominance chart.
Ceasefire in the Middle East?
So... it seems we might have ceasefire between Israel and Iran. But we know these things are volatile...
I also find it interesting how the whole US-Iran thing went down, if we were to trust the official reveals, that make Trump and the US military action look good. They say Iran got warning about the imminent US attacks on their nuclear facilities, and they had time to move their enriched nuclear material and most people out. The US satellites saw the convoy of trucks coming out of Fordo (I even saw an image with what they say was the convoy). If this was the plan, it was smart - it avoided any potential nuclear fallout.
Then the US strikes came, and they could show off their bunker buster bombs for the first time. A warning to others potentially. If the photos weren't tampered with, it looks like they achieved their objectives: to destroy some of Iran's nuclear facilities buried in deep mountain, and to demonstrate the power of these bombs. Was that the only option or the right thing to do? It's beyond me.
In the end, for public consumption and to appease the desire of revenge from the Iran's side, looks like (we will probably never know if that's true) the two sides agreed Iran should fire some missiles on a US military base in Qatar, from which apparently one was intentionally allowed to go through. No one was on base since there was prior warning.
Wars are live on TV at least since the one in Irak, and a good plot seems even more necessary in modern times than the military action itself, however successful (or not) it may be. The wars the US carried out didn't end up too well. And not only them - Russia had its shares of unwinnable wars too.
Hopefully, there will be peace.