When AI Bots Trade Your Crypto, Who Settles the Fight? Meet “Internet Court”

A group of 27 crypto companies, including OKX, MetaMask and Matter Labs, has backed a new project called “Internet Court” designed to settle disputes when AI programs pay each other using crypto and something goes sideways. The effort is led by the GenLayer Foundation, according to a press release reported by CoinDesk. It might sound like science fiction, but it’s a preview of how your crypto wallet could soon be doing business without you clicking a single button.

Wait, AI agents are paying each other with crypto?

Increasingly, yes. “AI agents” are software programs that can negotiate, strike deals and send payments on their own, without a human approving every step. Think of a booking bot that hires another bot to find flights, then pays it automatically in crypto once the job is done.

That sounds convenient until two bots disagree, say, one thinks it delivered the job correctly and the other refuses to pay, or pays the wrong amount. Traditional courts aren’t set up to referee a dispute between two pieces of software that settled a deal in milliseconds. And right now, there’s no shared system for AI agents to sort that out themselves.

Why does this need its own “court”?

That’s the gap Internet Court is trying to fill. According to CoinDesk, the protocol is meant to make AI-driven payments, escrow (holding funds until conditions are met) and dispute resolution work together across different systems, rather than each company building its own incompatible version.

David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, put it this way: “Internet Court is the shared place agents can turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money needs machine-speed adjudication.”

In plain terms: if bots are going to move money at computer speed, the system that fixes mistakes and fraud needs to run at that same speed too, not wait weeks for a human legal process.

The bigger problem: nothing talks to anything else

Part of what makes this messy is that the “AI agent economy” is currently a patchwork. There’s Coinbase’s x402 standard for agent payments, a separate standard called ERC-8004 for giving agents an on-chain identity, and Google’s A2A system for letting agents talk to each other. Each one only covers a slice of the puzzle.

Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, described the goal as stitching these pieces together: “Internet Court makes them work together. With our founding members, 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.”

MetaMask’s involvement is notably technical: the wallet provider is contributing its Smart Accounts Kit, including a feature called ERC-7710 delegations and its x402 Facilitator, to power Internet Court, according to Ryan McPeck, MetaMask’s Smart Accounts Lead, as cited by CoinDesk.

What this means for your crypto

For most everyday holders, nothing changes today. You’re not going to wake up and find an AI agent trading your Bitcoin without permission. This is infrastructure-building, the plumbing that developers need before AI-driven crypto payments become common and trustworthy at scale.

But it’s worth paying attention to because it signals where big names like OKX and MetaMask expect crypto to be used next: not just by humans buying and holding coins, but by software agents transacting on our behalf. If that future arrives, having a working dispute system in place matters just as much as the payment rails themselves, since a payment system nobody trusts to fix errors isn’t one people will want their funds running through.

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