Starknet powers launch of Internet Court for agentic commerce

Imagine two AI agents walk into a marketplace. One wants to buy cloud compute, the other wants to sell it. They negotiate a price, lock funds in escrow, execute the deal, and, if something goes sideways, resolve the dispute. No humans involved at any step. That’s the pitch behind Internet Court, which officially launched on July 10 with Starknet serving as its payments and settlement backbone.

What Internet Court actually does

Internet Court describes itself as an “open skill” for agentic commerce. In English: it’s a standardized toolkit that lets autonomous AI agents handle every phase of a commercial transaction without needing a human to step in and click buttons.

The system is organized across six principal layers. Agent discovery and contract formation rely on ERC standards. Negotiation happens through A2A protocols. Execution uses tools from partners in the ecosystem. And when deals go wrong, adjudication is embedded directly into the smart contracts themselves, with pre-agreed settlement mechanisms kicking in automatically.

Starknet’s specific role is handling the financial plumbing. Its zero-knowledge execution layer manages payments, escrow, and on-chain settlement. When Agent A pays Agent B, those funds flow through Starknet. When there’s a dispute, the adjudication logic executes on Starknet as well.

The broader stack pulls in several recognizable names. GenLayer and Kleros contribute to the execution and dispute resolution layers respectively. The x402 protocol handles payment authorization. The skill itself is accessible as a skill.md file, available through curl or GitHub, with a live clerk agent already running on Telegram via the project’s website at internetcourt.org.

The 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 that handles the entire transaction lifecycle is, at least in theory, the missing infrastructure that makes agent-to-agent commerce practical rather than just demonstrable.

What this means for investors

The integration of on-chain dispute resolution is perhaps the most underappreciated piece. Internet Court’s approach of embedding adjudication directly into smart contracts, with pre-agreed resolution mechanisms, offers at least a partial answer to the question of what happens when an AI agent makes a bad deal on your behalf.

The skill.md distribution model, essentially making the protocol as easy to integrate as reading a file, lowers the barrier considerably. The Telegram clerk agent is a live proof of concept accessible through internetcourt.org.

Kleros has been working on decentralized arbitration for years. GenLayer is building agent-specific smart contract infrastructure. Internet Court is pulling these projects into a unified stack rather than competing with them.

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