A group of 27 companies across the blockchain, AI, and digital payments sectors has introduced Internet Court, an open infrastructure standard designed to provide AI agents with a common framework for negotiating contracts, managing payments, and resolving disputes, according to a Friday statement.
Led by the GenLayer Foundation, the platform combines existing technologies for identity, payments, escrow, execution, and dispute resolution into a single framework, enabling AI agents to negotiate, complete, and enforce transactions entirely in natural language.
“Agentic commerce is reaching a critical turning point, and we’re not prepared for the potential fallout. 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,” David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, stated. “Internet Court is the shared place agents can turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money needs machine-speed adjudication.”
The consortium said the standard would solve a growing problem as AI-powered commerce accelerates. Although technologies such as Coinbase’s x402, Google’s A2A, and Ethereum-based identity standards already support individual aspects of agentic commerce, there has been no comprehensive mechanism for resolving disputes when automated agreements fail.
Internet Court aims to provide that missing layer through decentralized adjudication rather than traditional court systems. The initiative is backed by companies including GenLayer Labs, Matter Labs, OKX, MetaMask, and 0G Labs.
Internet Court’s early use cases are AI agent guardrails, automated enforcement of micro-value service agreements, and decentralized adjudication of disputed digital evidence.
“The natural way for agents to transact will be crypto, programmable money that moves without a human in the loop. As more and more of the transactions on the internet are carried out by agents, the full flow needs to be reliable, from payment all the way through to catching when something goes wrong,” Vassilis Tziokas, VP of Growth at Matter Labs, noted. “That’s why we’re supporting the Internet Court initiative – it gives agentic commerce a complete standard, from settlement to the resolution of inevitable disputes, and the chain powering it runs on the ZK Stack.”
