Two builds for Kusari: 7,777 assassins and a monthly art drop
A trait gallery for a generative NFT collection, wired with React and Firebase in the early ChatGPT era — and a monthly onchain art platform, co-owned and shipped on a first-of-the-month cadence.
Kusari is the studio behind Killer GF and Collectr, and full disclosure comes first: this is client work with skin in the game — our founder is also a co-owner on the Collectr side. Two engagements that happen to bookend how AI-assisted delivery has changed.
- Gallery tokens
- 7,777
- Traits
- 240+
- Monthly editions
- 25+
- Editions collected
- 2,180
Public figures from the live sites and marketplace listings at the time of writing.
The gallery, in the early ChatGPT era
Killer GF launched in January 2022: 7,777 generative assassin portraits by Paul “Zeronis” Kwon, the former Riot Games artist behind some of League of Legends' most-played champions — 240+ traits by the collection's own count, in ten categories. Our piece of it was the gallery — the browser where holders and collectors explore the full collection — built in React on Firestore, with cursor-paginated 24-token batches that memoize per filter combination, ten accordion trait filters with per-value counts, and a per-token modal with an OpenSea deep link and a hi-res IPFS lightbox.
The honest part: that Firebase wiring was done with GPT's help, in 2023 — before agentic tooling, when AI assistance meant carrying code between a chat window and an editor by hand. The leverage thesis this studio runs on today was already true then; the tools were just slower. We've been shipping with AI since it was awkward.
Collectr: a drop on the first, every month
Collectr is a monthly art-edition platform: a new limited edition by a new artist on the first of every month, stored permanently on Arweave, with subscriptions that auto-collect each drop and personalized member cards for subscribers. It has shipped 25+ editions since July 2024 without missing a month — and a first-of-the-month promise is a shipping discipline before it is a marketing line.
Our founder co-owns the platform and leads its frontend and marketing — setting direction with a team to delegate to, getting hands-on when it matters, and using AI throughout to iterate on UI, UX, and copy. It's the engagement model this studio recommends most rarely and believes in most: ownership.
Two Kusari builds, years apart: the first wired together with a chat window and patience, the second run on a monthly cadence with AI in every loop. Same thesis, better tools.
What we'd tell a client
- AI leverage isn't new to us — we were wiring React to Firestore with GPT in 2023, and the workflow lessons compound with every generation of tools.
- A recurring public deadline is the best process you can buy: 'the first of every month' forces scope honesty better than any methodology.
- Skin in the game changes how you build — when the studio co-owns the outcome, 'good enough' gets a harder definition.
- Permanence is a feature decision: storing the art on Arweave is what makes a digital edition worth collecting.