A consortium of 27 companies across the agentic and decentralized commerce infrastructure space has launched on July 10, 2026 Internet Court, an open standard designed to resolve disputes when AI agents transacting on behalf of humans or businesses disagree.
The initiative is led by the GenLayer Foundation, with OKX, 0G Labs, and Matter Labs’ ZKsync among the companies signed on, plus backing from ConsenSys MetaMask. The idea is to take protocols that have so far governed payments, escrow, and dispute resolution separately and fold them into one framework – so two AI agents can strike a deal, hold funds securely, and hash out a disagreement in plain language, no human required.
The timing reflects how quickly agent-to-agent commerce is scaling. Adobe has tracked a 4,700% year-over-year surge in traffic from generative AI tools to U.S. retail sites as of July 2025, and McKinsey estimates AI agents could mediate $3-5 trillion USD in global consumer commerce by 2030 – with as much as $1 trillion USD in the U.S. alone.
What’s missing, according to the consortium, is a way to handle it when things go wrong. Protocols like Coinbase’s x402 for payments, ERC-8004 for agent identity, and Google’s A2A for agent interoperability each cover one piece of the transaction lifecycle, but none of them address contractual disputes.
Meanwhile, traditional courts aren’t built for machine-speed disagreements; civil disputes in the U.S., on average, take 344 days to resolve.
“Agentic commerce is reaching a critical turning point, and we’re not prepared for the potential fallout,” said David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, in a statement. “Agents will disagree at machine speed, and the system meant to resolve such disagreements was built for parties with bodies and a finite tolerance for waiting.”
Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs – the research and engineering outfit building the protocol, distinct from the Foundation that stewards it – put it more bluntly:
“The agentic stack is being built right now, but each standard solves one layer. The Internet Court makes them work together… we’re turning a fragmented space into a single open skill that any agent can use to make financial commitments hold up, even when they’re contested,” he stated.
Internet Court works by linking existing protocols across the full lifecycle of an agentic deal – from discovery and identity (ERC-7857, ERC-8004), through negotiation (A2A), contracts (ERC-7710, ERC-8183, Arkhai), payment and escrow (x402, MPP, APP), execution (OpenClaw, Hermes), and finally verification and disputes, handled through GenLayer alongside Kleros and UMA.
The dispute layer is where GenLayer’s own technology comes in: the protocol uses decentralized AI validator consensus – what it deems Intelligent Contracts – to adjudicate agreements that require judgement rather than pure code execution, drawing on multiple large language models to reach a verdict.
MetaMask’s involvement centers on its Smart Accounts Kit, including ERC-7710 delegations and its x402 Facilitator, which GenLayer is using as the account and payment infrastructure underneath the standard.
Ryan McPeck, smart accounts lead at MetaMask, pointed to Osobot, an autonomous agent already running on the delegation framework, as an early example, noting it has been “autonomously shipping code, running a newsroom, and judging hackathons.”
Matter Labs framed its participation around completing the transaction stack end to end. “The natural way for agents to transact will be crypto, programmable money that moves without a human in the loop,” said Vassilis Tziokas, VP of growth at Matter Labs, adding that agentic commerce needs a standard covering “settlement to the resolution of inevitable disputes.”
Internet Court is designed as an open, openly-governed standard that any agent can adopt immediately. More details on the standard and its founding members are available at internetcourt.org.
Featured image: via Internet Court
Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
