Today, many altcoins have surpassed or nearing their ATH vs BTC valuation. More notable coins are nearing their ATH in USD valuation. What this all means is that Bitcoin's dominance over the markets will continue to dwindle, as it's contending with forthcoming specific-niche oriented multi-million dollar/billion-dollar businesses. This is quite healthy for the entire crypto climate, because where there's money to be made and upcoming competition, many real-world businesses will rise to the challenge and throw their capital into various of cryptocurrencies or crypto-related businesses. More and more money will be poured in, to gain market share either directly through cryptos or through related businesses.
Culminating with all that, there's many signs that point towards fully legitimizing cryptos (in the public eye), notably the SEC, through regulations and potentially the long-awaited (and hyped) BTC ETF approval. If that occurs, then almost all of U.S.'s allies will follow suite with similar regulations. This is why SEC is really a pivotal point in determining the future of crypto atm.
To a lesser degree, crypto has been behaving inversely to the world-market sentiments, for the past 3-months or so crypto's valuation can be somewhat correlated with what's happening in the world markets. A lot of unrest and a lot of indicators pointing towards a global recession nearing soon.
When regulations collide with a negative sentiment world-market and when BTC halves in 2020, we could be seeing a major bull-run occurring during or after those times. I'm not a fortune teller, but the evidence and most movement is increasingly depicting a more positive crypto atmosphere and climate as a whole now and in the near future. In 2017-2018 the bullmarket was driven by freshness and mostly FOMO. Crypto as a whole today, has never witnessed more market and business movements; that's not seen as changing anytime soon. This all leads into a solidification of infrastructure and use, where real value is going to be derived from for all cryptos.
I agree with you on SECs importance. The Crypto market is too volatile to attract key investors and become a stable currency and some of these problems causing the instability can be handled by SEC if given full authorisation.