Two years ago, Bella Protocol began a new chapter. After years of building DeFi products, from automated yield strategies to quantitative tools, we began exploring how AI could further a goal that had guided Bella from the start: making complex financial tools easier to use.
In September 2024, we introduced Bella’s refreshed AI-focused direction alongside the Bella Signal Bot. The starting point was practical: use AI to monitor crypto markets and deliver trading signals directly through Telegram, giving users an accessible way to follow market movements.
Over the next two years, that effort grew to include on-demand research, a larger user base, and a unified product in Bella Alpha. Most recently, the launch of SEMI AlphaReport has extended Bella Alpha’s research coverage into semiconductors, opening a new chapter beyond crypto.
September 2024: Bella Enters Its AI Era
When we announced our AI-focused rebrand in September 2024, the crypto market was already becoming increasingly difficult for individual users to monitor. Markets traded continuously, narratives changed quickly, and traders were expected to interpret price action, news, sentiment, technical indicators, and project developments across an enormous number of assets. Bella’s view was that AI could help reduce that burden.
The first expression of this strategy was the Bella Signal Bot, a Telegram-based AI trading assistant designed to continuously analyze market data and generate long and short signals for supported perpetual trading pairs. Importantly, the original Signal Bot was not built around a single universal strategy. It launched with five AI models — KnightML, ViperAI, AI Directional Risk, AI MeanRev, and OptimaShort — designed around different trading approaches and market conditions. That early multi-model structure would ultimately become an important part of Bella’s later product evolution.
Signal Bot: Growing Adoption and Reach
Within roughly the first month, Bella Signal Bot reached 1,500 subscribers, while Bella continued working with partners including Phoenix and ApeX around AI trading applications. The product’s appeal was intentionally straightforward: choose the market intelligence that suited your needs, receive signals through Telegram, and retain control over the final trading decision.
From there, Signal Bot became a much larger part of Bella’s ecosystem. New trading pairs were added, integrations expanded, and the product increasingly became available through external AI and trading platforms rather than being confined to a single Bella-owned entry point.
The growth curve accelerated substantially during 2025. The Signal Bot grew from around 135,000 subscribers in June 2025 to more than 200,000 by the end of August. That period also saw the bot expand its supported trading pairs and connect with additional trading surfaces and AI ecosystems. By the end of April 2026, Signal Bot had reached 526,080 subscribers, crossing the half-million subscriber milestone. Just a few months later, that figure rose to 659,085 subscribers and more than 81,000 monthly active users.
From 1,500 early subscribers to nearly 660,000, the growth represented more than a headline number. It helped validate several assumptions behind the original product. Users valued accessible market signals, they valued having a choice of models and strategies, and Telegram could function as a low-friction interface for AI-powered trading intelligence.
Research Bot: Moving From What to Why
By the end of 2024, Bella’s AI strategy was expanding from market discovery toward market understanding with the arrival of the Bella LLM Research Bot.
While the Signal Bot was primarily designed to identify market conditions and surface trading signals, our Research Bot approached the market from a different direction: using large language models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to help users investigate crypto projects, market information, prices, trends, and other relevant context through natural-language queries.
We continued expanding Research Bot throughout 2025 and 2026 through both product improvements and integrations with other projects and AI-agent ecosystems. By spring 2026, Signal Bot and Research Bot had become available through numerous external AI platforms and marketplaces, including ecosystems such as Z.ai, 4AI, Base44, MiniMax, Manus, Agent.ai, and others.
Research Bot’s user base grew alongside that expansion. At the end of April 2026, it had reached 10,474 subscribers. By July, that figure had grown to 11,997.
The two products were developing at different scales and serving different behaviors, but their relationship was becoming increasingly obvious. Users could discover market activity through Signal Bot, then use Research Bot to investigate the asset or understand the surrounding context.
2026: Signal Bot and Research Bot Become Bella Alpha
In summer 2026, that next stage arrived with Bella Alpha.
Bella Alpha represents the evolution of both Signal Bot and Research Bot into a single AI market-intelligence product. Instead of asking users to move between separate Telegram bots, Bella Alpha brings AI-powered trading signals, crypto research, market data, project information, and related research tools into one connected experience.
The concept builds directly on what Bella learned from the previous two years. Signal Bot demonstrated demand for accessible market discovery and specialized model choice. Research Bot demonstrated demand for on-demand market understanding. Bella Alpha connects those behaviors so that a signal can become the beginning of a research process rather than the end of one.
A user may first discover a changing market condition through one of Bella Alpha’s specialized AI models. From there, they can investigate the asset, search for additional information, examine project context, and continue researching without needing to rebuild the entire workflow somewhere else.
The launch was therefore more than a merger of two Telegram bots. It represented a shift in how we thought about the product itself, from individual AI tools performing individual functions toward a more connected market-intelligence workflow.
Beyond Crypto: Introducing SEMI AlphaReport
For most of Bella’s AI journey, the scope was deliberately centered on cryptocurrency. But markets do not always stay inside clean category boundaries. That led Bella Alpha to its first major research expansion outside crypto: semiconductors.
In August 2026, Bella introduced SEMI AlphaReport, a new semiconductor research-intelligence stream inside Bella Alpha and the first step toward expanding the product from crypto-focused intelligence into broader market research. SEMI AlphaReport subscriptions are now available with BEL, giving users access to ongoing semiconductor research through Bella Alpha.
The choice of semiconductors was intentional. AI may be experienced primarily through software, but the industry ultimately depends on a vast hardware ecosystem encompassing accelerators, memory, foundry capacity, advanced packaging, networking, power systems, semiconductor equipment, materials, and data-center infrastructure. Understanding the AI economy increasingly means understanding some of the supply chains enabling it.
This expansion does not represent a move away from crypto. Bella Alpha continues to develop its crypto signals and research capabilities. Semiconductor intelligence simply represents the beginning of an effort to see whether the market-intelligence framework developed through Signal Bot, Research Bot, and Bella Alpha can be useful across additional research categories.
Conclusion
When Bella announced its AI rebrand in 2024, we described Signal Bot as the beginning of an AI-powered transformation. At the time, the immediate focus was making sophisticated crypto trading signals more accessible. Two years later, the scope of that idea has grown considerably.
Today, Bella Alpha combines the lessons from both sides of that journey: discovery and understanding, signals and research, specialized models and conversational intelligence. SEMI AlphaReport now adds another dimension. For the first time, Bella is applying that research framework beyond crypto and toward an industry at the center of the AI economy itself.
Bella’s AI journey began by asking how artificial intelligence could make crypto trading easier to navigate. Now, we’re answering the much broader question of how AI can make increasingly complex markets easier to understand. Bella Alpha is our latest answer, and we’re still building.
Explore Bella Alpha on Telegram.
About Bella
Aiming to make crypto trading, research, and yield opportunities easier to navigate, Bella Protocol offers a suite of accessible products across AI-powered market intelligence and quantitative strategy development. Its product ecosystem includes Bella Alpha, a multi-chain yield protocol, and a programmatic Uniswap V3 simulator.
Bella Alpha is the next evolution of Bella Signal Bot and Bella Research Bot, bringing AI-powered trading signals, market data, project information, and crypto research together in one Telegram experience. Powered by five specialized AI models, Bella Alpha monitors supported perpetual trading pairs and delivers long, short, and close signals across different market conditions. Its LLM- and Retrieval-Augmented Generation-powered research engine also allows users to ask market-related questions, search relevant information, and explore supported crypto projects, creating a more connected workflow from identifying a market movement to researching the context behind it without switching between separate tools.
Beyond AI market intelligence, Bella Protocol has developed a broader suite of DeFi and quantitative tools. Bella LP Farm provides liquidity providers with access to yield opportunities across multiple networks, while Tuner is a programmatic Uniswap V3 simulator that enables developers and quantitative strategists to backtest and refine strategies using historical or custom data while preserving Uniswap V3 smart-contract behavior.
Bella Protocol is backed by Binance Labs, Arrington XRP Capital, and several other renowned investors.
For more information about Bella or to join our team, please contact us at contact@bella.fi Learn about Bella’s recent official news: Medium: https://medium.com/@BellaofficialTwitter: @BellaProtocolTelegram: https://t.me/bellaprotocolDiscord: https://discord.gg/jcuFJZWFMhGitbook: https://bellafi.gitbook.io/bella-protocol