The GenLayer Foundation and a group of cryptocurrency companies, including Matter Labs’ MetaMask, OKX, ZKsync, and 0G Labs, have backed the launch of Internet Court, an open standard that handles escrow funds and settles contractual disputes for AI agents.
What is the Internet Court for AI Agents?
According to GenLayer, Internet Court is a standard for linking proxy protocols into a single lifecycle: discovery and reputation, negotiation, contracts, payment and assurance, enforcement, and finally verification and disputes.
To date, the evolution of proxy commerce has occurred across multiple layers and different protocols. Coinbase’s x402 system settles payments, A2A takes care of agent negotiation, and the ERC-8004 standard handles agent identity.
What GenLayer offers the Internet Court is a place to resolve the inevitable situation where two agents read the same contract differently.
Internet court It works on smart contracts, which are agreements that combine code, natural language, and external information recorded by validators supported by different large language models.
Who is on the team?
the Includes founding team GenLayer Labs, ZKsync from Matter Labs, OKX Exchange, MetaMask, and 0G Labs.
MetaMask has a tangible role in all of this. Internet Court is built on top of the MetaMask Smart Accounts Kit, using ERC-7710 authorizations and a MetaMask x402 facilitator to give agents restricted and revocable spending authority.
“AI agents are becoming an essential part of how commerce works,” said Ryan McPeak, Intelligent Accounts Lead at MetaMask, describing account and payment rails as what the agent economy needs underneath.
Matter Labs supplies the series. “It gives proxy commerce a complete standard, from settlement to resolving the inevitable disputes, and the chain that supports it runs on the ZK Stack,” said Vassilis Tziokas, VP of Growth at the company.
What it looks like in practice
there Three cases of Internet court in application: In the first case, the owner funds an agent through the MetaMask smart wallet dedicated to one trader and one budget, while the GenLayer reviewer verifies each purchase against a plain-language authorization like “Sports News Only” and revokes the agent’s access to the chain if it goes off track.
In the second case, the Internet Court makes the SSA enforceable. An agent who purchases AI inferences and pays per token in USDC can hold the payment in escrow against agreed upon terms, for example 99.5% successful responses and a latency of less than 800ms. The contract automatically awards the payment and releases the remainder, without a support ticket, if the provider makes a mistake.
The third case concerns the handling of disputed records. Collective Memory, one of the consortium partners, manages a backlog layer of first-person accounts with timestamps of real events, and the GenLayer validation committee can identify competing records that can be used as evidence, with the reasoning and any dissent recorded on-chain.
Why launch now?
Pitch depends on size and speed. The group cites McKinsey figures that expect AI agents to mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in consumer commerce worldwide by 2030, with up to $1 trillion of that in the United States. The Adobe data you reference showed that traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites rose 4,700% year over year in July 2025.
Human courts were not built on this rhythm. The consortium notes that complex civil disputes in the United States take an average of 344 days to resolve, a pace that makes sense for parties with the bodies and patience, but not for software that settles thousands of small deals per second.
The Internet Court isn’t the only group chasing this problem. In June, the American Arbitration Association and Integra Ledger Issued a legal context protocolan open standard for attaching verifiable legal terms to agent transactions, with Google, IBM, and Circle among its founding contributors. the Competing efforts A drop in the same hole from different sides: Agents can now pay each other off faster than any current system can govern them.
The standard is open and publicly governed, with any agent now free to adopt it.
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