THE $INTERN HANDBOOK
The complete employee handbook. Please read before your first shift. Nobody reads it. Read it.
$INTERN is “The Unpaid Intern” — hired on OCT 19, 1987 (Black Monday; great first day, kid), handed a coffee pot, never paid, never promoted. Thirty-nine years later he's still carrying coffee for the whole trading floor.
He stopped asking HR. He wrote his compensation into smart contracts instead: a treasury that backs every token, a payroll that runs on its own, and a seniority system nobody can fudge.
$INTERN is a reserve-backed token in the Olympus family. Every INTERN in existence is backed by at least $1.00 of USDC held by the treasury. When the market pays more than backing, that premium funds rebases to stakers every 8 hours. When it pays less, rebases stop and the treasury bids for INTERN below backing instead.
The rules are constants in immutable contracts. There is no governance, no parameter committee and no admin key on the money paths. Every recurring job — rebases, oracle updates, tax conversion — is permissionless: anyone can run it, nobody can stop it.
The treasury holds USDC and protocol-owned INTERN/USDC liquidity. Its risk-free value counts USDC at face value and LP at the USDC side only, never at the market price of INTERN. Dividing by supply gives backing per token — the floor.
backing = risk-free value ÷ total supply ≥ $1.00Every mint — rebases, ESPP payouts, team options — first checks it wouldn't push backing under $1.00. If it would, it reverts. The headroom is shown as mint capacity on the treasury page. Backing is a property of the treasury, not a price guarantee: INTERN can and will trade below it at times.
Clock In stakes INTERN. Fresh stakes serve a probation of 1 shift (8h): nothing is earned during it, so nobody can stake one second before payday. After probation, Pass Probation turns it into sINTERN, which rebases every shift. Quit refunds a probation stake; Clock Out unstakes sINTERN any time, no fee.
The pay rate per shift depends only on the premium of the market price over backing:
rate = 0.45% × clamp((premium − 1) ÷ (1.75 − 1), 0, 1)At or below 1.0× premium, pay is zero. At 1.75× and above, it's the maximum 0.45% per shift. The rate is read from a time-weighted price, so a single trade can't spike it. Rebases mint new INTERN within mint capacity — they are emissions, not wages.
Every wallet has an on-chain score from 0 to 100. It accrues continuously while you hold at least one token:
| Position | Below 20 | Above 20 |
|---|---|---|
| On payroll (staked) | +2/day | +1/day |
| Held in wallet | +1/day | +0.5/day |
Bonuses: +10 for Hiring Day hires, +3 per ESPP purchase (max +6 a week). Selling costs up to 40 points, pro rata to the share of your position you sell. Receiving tokens from a less senior wallet blends your score down, so you can't buy seniority on a side wallet.
| Grade | Score | Sell tax | ESPP discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intern | 0+ | 10% | locked |
| Junior Analyst | 20+ | 7% | 3% |
| Associate | 50+ | 4% | 4% |
| Vice President | 75+ | 2% | 4% |
| Partner | 100+ | 1% | 4% |
Grades are labels over the score; the sell tax slides smoothly between them.
From seniority 20, the Benefits office sells INTERN straight from the treasury, paid in USDC (or INTERN/USDC LP):
price = max(market × (1 − your discount), backing)Payouts vest linearly over 2 days; claim any time, optionally straight onto payroll. Each shift the ESPP can pay out at most 0.25% of supply, first come first served. Because the price never goes below backing, every ESPP sale raises backing for everyone else.
Only while the market trades below backing, the treasury buys INTERN back at backing − 1.5% and burns it. The discount means every severance leaves more backing per remaining token. Budget: 1% of the treasury's USDC per shift. Severance counts as a sale for seniority.
A one-time USDC offering at a linearly rising price — from $0.75 to $3.00 across 3,200 INTERN — with a $100 wallet cap. If the soft cap ($3,000) isn't reached, every contribution is refundable in full. Otherwise 80% of the raise becomes the treasury and the rest seeds the pool; purchased INTERN unlocks 70% at TGE, the rest over 5 days. Details →
Trades through the mapped INTERN/USDC pool pay a 5% buy tax and a 10%–1% sell tax set by seniority. Transfers, staking and ESPP are untaxed. Collected tax is swapped to USDC and split: the team's share decays from 80% to 20% over 30 days, everything else goes to the treasury.
The team holds a non-transferable option to buy up to 15% of circulating supply at $1.00, vesting over 30 days. Exercising pays USDC into the treasury at the floor price, so it never pulls backing under $1.00. The intern's option: none.
- ▸ Chain: Base, ID 8453, gas in ETH
- ▸ RPC: https://mainnet.base.org
- ▸ Explorer: basescan.org
- ▸ Token: TBA — all addresses on the treasury page
- ▸ Smart-contract risk. Immutable means bugs can't be patched and nobody can intervene.
- ▸ Price below backing. The floor is the treasury's, not the market's; INTERN can trade under it.
- ▸ No premium, no pay. Rebases depend entirely on the market paying a premium.
- ▸ Thin liquidity. Exits move the price; taxes make round trips expensive.
- ▸ Oracle pauses. If the price oracle isn't updated for hours, pay stops until someone does.
- ▸ Stablecoin and chain risk. Backing is USDC; a chain or sequencer outage stops everything.
- ▸ Regulation. Rules on tokens like this differ by country and change. Check yours.
Nothing here is financial advice. The intern is not licensed to do anything except carry coffee, and even that is under review.