A group of crypto and Web3 firms, including OKX, MetaMask and Matter Labs, has backed a new protocol called Internet Court to settle disputes between AI agents. The project is led by the GenLayer Foundation, and the consortium now counts 27 member companies in total.
Why does artificial intelligence need its own court?
AI agents already negotiate with each other and move money between themselves without a human in the loop. One agent, for instance, might order a service from another on a company's behalf, agree on a price and settle the invoice within seconds. But just like deals between people, these arrangements sometimes end in disagreement: an agent fails to deliver, a payment gets stuck, or the two sides simply read the agreement differently.
The problem is that agentic systems have no built-in way to settle such conflicts, and traditional courts were never built to handle a case where one of the parties is a piece of software. A person disputing a deal can wait months for a court date, but an agent needs a ruling within seconds or minutes, or the whole premise of autonomous commerce falls apart. That's the gap the new protocol is meant to fill.
What problem is Internet Court actually solving?
According to David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, agentic commerce is moving far faster than the infrastructure built to resolve conflicts within it. Companies spent years building separate systems for payments, escrow and identity, and none of them could talk to each other directly.
"Internet Court is the shared place agents can turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money needs machine-speed adjudication."
- David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, from a GenLayer press release, July 10, 2026
How does the technology actually work?
Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, explained that the agentic payments market already has several separate standards, and each one covers only its own slice of the problem, without adding up to a single working system.
- Point: the x402 protocol handles the actual payments between agents and runs on top of ordinary web requests.
- ERC-8004 handles agent identity on the network, so other participants can verify exactly who they're dealing with.
- Google's A2A protocol handles interoperability between different agents built on different platforms.
- none of these standards on its own decides what happens once a deal goes wrong.
Internet Court ties these pieces together into one system. Technically, GenLayer relies on the MetaMask Smart Accounts Kit, including ERC-7710 delegations on the Ethereum network, plus its x402 Facilitator, according to Ryan McPeck, Smart Accounts Lead at MetaMask. ERC-7710 delegation lets a wallet owner grant an agent limited permission to act on their behalf, for example spending funds only up to a set cap, and that's what makes arbitration technically possible in the first place.
Who joined the GenLayer consortium?
Founding backers of the protocol include the crypto exchange OKX, the wallet MetaMask, infrastructure developer Matter Labs and GenLayer itself. In total, 27 companies from the crypto and Web3 industry have backed the protocol, though the full list of members hasn't been disclosed yet.
According to Castellana, the consortium's goal is to turn a fragmented market into a single open tool that any agent can use to make its financial commitments hold up even when they're contested.
What does this mean for the agentic commerce market?
Agentic commerce is picking up speed fast among the biggest names in crypto. Exchanges, wallets and infrastructure firms are all building tools for autonomous payments at the same time, often without coordinating with each other. Internet Court is a first attempt to give the industry a shared way to resolve conflicts instead of a dozen incompatible systems.
It's not the only sign that major players are betting on autonomous trading specifically. This week Kraken announced an AI investing assistant for its own app, and Robinhood is preparing a similar feature for crypto traders. If agents really do start trading and negotiating without a human involved, the question of who settles their disputes stops being theoretical.
Whether the protocol becomes the de facto standard will depend on how many more companies join the consortium in the coming months. For now, GenLayer and its partners are betting that agents, like people, will eventually need a court of their own.
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