Bitcoin is staying the same and independent.
What happened is that there is another fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Private (BTCP). Normally you get 1 to 1 of each coin when someone forks the original, but in this case they forked from Bitcoin and airdropped to ZClassic (ZCL) holders, a privacy coin. So you get 1 BTCP for every BTC and 1 BTCP for every ZCL.
This caused the price of ZCL to raise to a high price before the fork date (Feb. 28th) and fall precipitously afterward.
Bitcoin Private is being developed by a completely separate team than those who work on the main Bitcoin chain. There is also the argument that Bitcoin Private may not even be a worthwhile product since the main Bitcoin chain devs are working on Schnorr, another scaling protocol for the original Bitcoin that will also improve privacy.