It was $10 to get an account but you also get credits to spend in the game with your account. And it was $10 since the alpha days long before the play to earn hype of the last bull run.

They couldn't mint enough accounts from their own stack and spent a couple of million to buy hive from the market and mint new accounts at the peak of the game. We were already in a bull market but that combined with people buying hive to spend in game was the biggest reason that we saw $3.

They crashed the game by flooding the markets with chaos cards thinking that the bull run was going to keep going but instead it killed the scarcity factor of the game, killed the rental market as everybody had access to buy cheap cards and the bots were printing the reward cards in huge numbers.

On top of that they kept flooding the market with new items like validators and promos into a bear market soaking up whatever funds could have been used for the card markets.

The bots didn't kill the games momentum but the printing of assets did.

They weren't the sole reason for the last pump but i do think that they were the biggest reason for it.