Here is a clearer explanation. DeDe is not a courier service and not a gig app. It is only infrastructure, a smart contract protocol.

DeDe is not an app, not a marketplace and not a company. It is a tiny delivery settlement rail that sits on Ethereum, similar to how Bitcoin sits under money transfers and Matrix sits under messaging. Those systems do not provide apps or account systems, they provide rails. DeDe works the same way but for physical delivery.

This is what the protocol actually does. Anyone can register a parcel on chain as an NFT. The sender deposits the parcel value into escrow, because the escrow amount represents the value of the item/parcel/delivery. Anyone who wants to can pick up a parcel and deliver it. It is completely voluntary and there are no assignments, no scheduling and no forced routes. The smart contract holds the escrow until both sides confirm that the parcel arrived. When they agree, the contract releases the payment to the carrier and takes a 0.5 percent transaction fee from the escrow. It is a transaction fee, NOT a parcel fee. The remaining 99.5 percent goes to the carrier.

If someone builds an app or a marketplace on top of DeDe and decides to charge an additional service fee, that fee belongs to that external service. It is outside the protocol, outside the smart contract and outside DeDe entirely. For example, if a carrier receives 95 percent of the parcel value, DeDe still only took 0.5 percent as the transaction fee, while the other 4.5 percent would be the fee of that particular app or marketplace. DeDe does not define or control those business models.

There is no app, no login system, no surveillance layer, no tracking and no central operator baked into DeDe. Those things, if anyone wants them, are built by others. A future marketplace built on top of DeDe becomes a kind of free for all UPS or DHL where senders and carriers meet, but all settlement still flows through the trustless contract. That part is the only responsibility of DeDe.

Carriers can choose any parcel they want. If a parcel matches their daily route, it is efficient and reduces the number of trucks in cities, but they can also deliver completely unrelated parcels if that is what they prefer. with what kind of transport they prefer. Everything is voluntary.

The trust comes from the smart contract. It does not track or identify anyone. It simply releases money when both sides confirm delivery. That is the entire mechanism, a neutral settlement layer for physical logistics. Everything above that, including apps, marketplaces and business logic, belongs to the people who build on top of it.

If anything is unclear I can explain more.

Fedex and UPS deliver almost anywhere, and can do insured packages. Here in the U.S. there's also the postal service, which also can deliver across a wide geography, beyond that of the U.S. borders. These cost a trivial amount of money and if one has a post office near them, they can pay with cash and avoid revealing their identity.

It sounds like you want people to use a form of cryptocurrency to pay a stranger, whichever stranger comes first, to deliver a physical package, then paying the deliverer once the package is accepted, using that same cryptocurrency.

Even if the protocol doesn't track or identify anyone, if the ledger is available for anyone to see or even if it were limited to package deliverers, a tracking mechanism would be trivial to create.

This does not guarantee any level of security for the package, only the payment, which is only theoretically secure because I haven't taken the time to check.

If it somehow took off as a solution people needed, once a package is put on the chain, there could potentially a mad free-for-all of deliverers, all fighting tooth and nail to get that package.

The entire trip delivering would also be fraught with dangers potentially, as deliverers who weren't fast enough might simply rob or kill the winning deliverer, take the package, then deliver it themselves. If they wanted to...

If the payment for a package is high enough, one might wonder just what was so important to warrant such a payment. Drugs? Guns? Biological weapons? Black market organs for transplant? Actual cash money?

Don't forget that computational costs electricity, which costs the environment until the world gets off of fossil fuels. Potential users would have to ask themselves if the package delivery is more important than climate change.

This sounds like a way to try and make crypto money, for doing absolutely nothing, by inserting crypto into a market that doesn't need it, to do a job already handled just fine by companies that already have the infrastructure in place, with no real problem being solved that needs solved.

What problem does this solve? How does this make package delivering any better?

Thanks for the thoughtful critique. Some clarification to help:

DeDe isn’t trying to replace FedEx/UPS/USPS.

DeDe is not a platform or an app.
It’s a protocol, closer to TCP/IP than Uber.

It handles one function only:

escrow -> pickup -> dropoff -> finalize

Everything else (matching, identity, trust, messaging, routing) is off-chain, by design.
That separation is what preserves privacy and prevents metadata leakage.

What problem DeDe actually solves

Not postal logistics, those require fleets, warehouses, and fixed infrastructure.

DeDe addresses the centralized crowdshipping model used by Uber/Doordash/Amazon Flex:

• zero privacy
• centralized control
• data extraction and surveillance
• wage manipulation
• platform lock-in
• mandatory identity
• opaque matching

DeDe gives communities the same underlying mechanics of crowdshipping
without a corporation in the middle collecting or exploiting sender/carrier/destination data.

No tracking, no identity, no metadata

Parcel NFTs only encode:

• parcel ID
• escrow amount
• lifecycle state

No names, addresses, routes, timestamps, or identities.
All sensitive information stays off-chain.

DeDe doesn’t broadcast parcels, seek couriers, or coordinate delivery.
It only settles funds trustlessly.

No token, no speculation

• no governance token
• no staking token
• no inflation
• no “earn crypto for nothing”
• no VC angle

Ethereum is used strictly as a neutral, permissionless escrow layer.

In short

DeDe is a tiny, open, neutral settlement rail for P2P delivery,
just infrastructure communities can use or ignore as they like.

Regarding environmental footprint:

Blockchain environmental impact depends on how electricity is produced, not on the existence of computation itself.
Electricity demand has been rising for decades, long before blockchains or AI, and will continue to do so.

If critical economic infrastructure depended on abundant, cheap green power,
it would create a strong incentive for energy producers to scale sustainable sources faster.
The largest investors in green energy today are still heavily tied to fossil fuels,
so shifting economic incentives can help accelerate the transition.

Thanks for the thoughtful critique. Some clarification to help:

DeDe isn’t trying to replace FedEx/UPS/USPS.

DeDe is not a platform or an app.
It’s a protocol, closer to TCP/IP than Uber.

It handles one function only:

escrow -> pickup -> dropoff -> finalize

Everything else (matching, identity, trust, messaging, routing) is off-chain, by design.
That separation is what preserves privacy and prevents metadata leakage.

What problem DeDe actually solves

Not postal logistics, those require fleets, warehouses, and fixed infrastructure.

DeDe addresses the centralized crowdshipping model used by Uber/Doordash/Amazon Flex:

• zero privacy
• centralized control
• data extraction and surveillance
• wage manipulation
• platform lock-in
• mandatory identity
• opaque matching

DeDe gives communities the same underlying mechanics of crowdshipping
without a corporation in the middle collecting or exploiting sender/carrier/destination data.

No tracking, no identity, no metadata

Parcel NFTs only encode:

• parcel ID
• escrow amount
• lifecycle state

No names, addresses, routes, timestamps, or identities.
All sensitive information stays off-chain.

DeDe doesn’t broadcast parcels, seek couriers, or coordinate delivery.
It only settles funds trustlessly.

No token, no speculation

• no governance token
• no staking token
• no inflation
• no “earn crypto for nothing”
• no VC angle

Ethereum is used strictly as a neutral, permissionless escrow layer.

In short

DeDe is a tiny, open, neutral settlement rail for P2P delivery,
just infrastructure communities can use or ignore as they like.

Regarding environmental footprint:

Blockchain environmental impact depends on how electricity is produced, not on the existence of computation itself.
Electricity demand has been rising for decades, long before blockchains or AI, and will continue to do so.

If critical economic infrastructure depended on abundant, cheap green power,
it would create a strong incentive for energy producers to scale sustainable sources faster.
The largest investors in green energy today are still heavily tied to fossil fuels,
so shifting economic incentives can help accelerate the transition.

I understand the skepticism and it's justified, NFTs have gotten a bad rep. =)
Personally, I never speculated on NFTs. It’s never been my thing. But the tech itself? Solid. It’s just been misused.

Just because a technology gets applied poorly doesn’t make it inherently bad.
This is why I think they're perfect for this use case:

An NFT is just a digital record of ownership for something non-fungible (i.e., unique and indivisible). Unlike fungible tokens like ETH or BTC (which you can split or mix), an NFT always refers to one unique thing.

In the case of DeDe, the NFT represents a parcel, not a jpg, not art. The NFT holds metadata like:

Parcel ID

Lifecycle state (e.g. Created, PickedUp, Delivered)

Reference to encrypted pickup/dropoff info

It’s not trying to “put the package on-chain,” just anchor its identity and state in a verifiable, tamper-proof way. If someone tries to fake a parcel NFT, the metadata won’t match, you’ll instantly detect it as invalid. This is way harder to spoof than a PDF shipping label or a database entry.

Same tech could be used for:

Title deeds

Car ownership

Event tickets

Access credentials

So yeah, NFT hype was a mess, but the primitive itself is useful when applied to real-world logistics, ownership, and transfer.