Agentic commerce – transactions involving AI agents – is expected to reach at least $3 trillion a year by the end of the decade, according to the consulting firm McKinsey.
But what happens when the agents get into a dispute?
A group of blockchain companies now aims to create an open standard they say would let agents resolve contract differences at machine speed.
The effort, known as "Internet Court," is being led by GenLayer, a blockchain protocol that uses decentralized AI to resolve contracts, conceived as an "adjudication layer for agentic commerce," according to a press release this week.
Executives leading the group claim that "agents will disagree at machine speed," and "we're not prepared for the potential fallout." The infrastructure of this emerging economy remains fragmented, with few systems set up to handle the situation when something goes wrong.
Traditional courts take an average of 344 days to resolve complex U.S. civil disputes, according to the group. So the idea is that AI could dramatically increase the speed of dispute resolution, similar to the way the technology has already accelerated software development, marketing and business workflows.
“The agentic stack is being built right now,” Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, said in the statement. “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."
According to the press release, the GenLayer-led consortium includes contributions from blockchain heavyweights Matter Labs, developer of ZKsync; MetaMask, the crypto wallet; OKX, a crypto exchange; and 0G Labs, creator of a decentralized AI operating system.
GenLayer raised $7.5 million in a seed round in August 2024.
(HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to handle press-release rewrites. I then used Distro Publisher, our MCP server, to file a draft directly to DistroVerse, our web app for news distribution. I used the DistroVerse editing interface to make some edits (in this case almost a complete rewrite), and I personally checked all the facts prior to publication.)