A new open protocol called Internet Court launched on July 10, aiming to let AI agents autonomously negotiate, pay, and settle disputes in commercial transactions. Starknet provides the payments and settlement backbone, handling escrow and on-chain settlement through its zero-knowledge execution layer.
How Internet Court works
Internet Court describes itself as an "open skill" for agentic commerce — a standardized toolkit that enables autonomous AI agents to handle every phase of a transaction without human intervention. The system is organized across six layers: agent discovery and contract formation rely on ERC standards, negotiation uses A2A protocols, execution taps ecosystem partners, and adjudication is embedded directly into smart contracts with pre-agreed settlement mechanisms.
Starknet's specific role is managing the financial plumbing. When Agent A pays Agent B, funds flow through Starknet. When a dispute arises, the adjudication logic executes on Starknet as well. The broader stack includes GenLayer and Kleros for execution and dispute resolution, the x402 protocol for payment authorization, and the skill is accessible as a skill.md file via curl or GitHub. A live clerk agent is already running on Telegram through internetcourt.org.
Partners and the bigger picture
The launch consortium includes Heurist, a decentralized AI inference platform, along with Alt AI and io.net, which provides distributed GPU infrastructure. Internet Court's thesis is that agents won't achieve real economic autonomy until these layers are unified. A single composable skill handling the entire transaction lifecycle is, at least in theory, the missing infrastructure that makes agent-to-agent commerce practical.
Implications for investors
The integration of on-chain dispute resolution is perhaps the most underappreciated piece. Internet Court's approach of embedding adjudication into smart contracts offers at least a partial answer to what happens when an AI agent makes a bad deal on your behalf. The skill.md distribution model lowers the barrier considerably, making the protocol as easy to integrate as reading a file. Kleros has been working on decentralized arbitration for years, and GenLayer is building agent-specific smart contract infrastructure. Internet Court pulls these projects into a unified stack rather than competing with them.