Over the past two days, Bitcoin's price has went from a low of $2,450 to over $2,800 and is up over 7% over the past 24 hours, but many people don't know why. And Altcoins across the board are down quite a few percentage points (note the image below). Not only that, Bitcoin captured more than 50% of the cryptocurrency market cap again. The August 1st deadline is approaching fast for Bitcoin to implement a new software to improve the block size limit, since the Bitcoin network can only handle about three transactions per second at the moment. It now seems more clear that there will be a hard fork, creating Bitcoin Cash (BCC). BCC will allow blocks to handle up to 8 MB, or eight times the current block size limit, greatly reducing speed and transaction costs. Futures on BCC are putting it around $400 per Coin Market Cap futures. Now a lot of people don't understand what a hard fork does, it basically means there will be two different coins (chains) after August 1st, at 12:20 UTC. So say a person owns one Bitcoin, after the hard fork, they will have one Bitcoin and one BCC. Though you have to be holding your Bitcoins in a private wallet or on exchanges that support BCC, otherwise you won't receive them.
Now to the beginning question, why would Bitcoin's price be rising? People will now receive two coins, one that will be valued around $2,800 (assuming the price doesn't jump one way or another) and one that is worth $400. So you're getting $400 in value for holding bitcoin and your getting a faster bitcoin (BCC). Now you see why people are buying, you are getting $400 in value for holding a single bitcoin, so you can imagine people are driving the demand of bitcoin up as we speak which explains the price rise through simple supply and demand.
Kraken, the online exchange stated to expect extreme volatility from BCC. This can be expected since you will probably have a bunch of people dumping their BCC to convert into another coin or fiat as soon as possible since their is so much uncertainty. The futures are so volatile, they lost 50% of their value between July 27th and 28th, though they did recover back up to around $400 mark. Only time will tell what the future of BCC will be. Though last year in July, Ethereum split into two, creating Ethereum Classic which was though to be dead for awhile and now is the seventh largest cryptocurrency at a $1.2 billion market cap. So at this point anything is possible for BCC, but I wouldn't be surprised if it survives this rocky road it has ahead. As I stated earlier, it will reduce transaction costs and time immensely compared to where Bitcoin is at now. That isn't to go without saying that it might eventually get clogged up too, since this is simply making the block size limit eight times bigger.
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Disclaimer: this is not investment advice, always do your own research. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances.