DeDe Protocol: A Trustless Settlement Layer for Physical Delivery

TL;DR
DeDe is a minimal Ethereum-based protocol for decentralized physical delivery.
It handles settlement, not logistics: No fleet, no terminal, no app, no routing, no identity.
Just trustless escrow, deterministic parcel lifecycle, and immutable protocol fees.

Motivation

We have decentralized infrastructure for:

• Money (Bitcoin)
• Communication (Matrix)
• Compute (Ethereum)
• Privacy (Tor)

But physical delivery still a key part of human coordination remains centralized, fragile, and opaque.

Postal systems are slow, expensive, often fail to deliver, and structurally incompatible with privacy.
Meanwhile, enormous underutilized capacity exists in everyday human movement:
people walk, bike, drive, and commute along routes that could carry parcels.

DeDe lets anyone tap into that movement.
It enables real-world delivery as a trustless, peer-to-peer settlement flow, not a logistics monopoly.

What It Is

DeDe is not an app, not a marketplace, and not a company.
It is a small Ethereum smart contract protocol that allows:

• Senders to register a parcel NFT + escrow
• Carriers to voluntarily pick it up
• Delivery to be confirmed (opt-in)
• Settlement to be finalized without trusted intermediaries

The protocol governs:

• Who gets paid
• Under what conditions
• How funds are held and released
• Immutable protocol fee routing
• Minimal incentive alignment

All logistics, routing, and app-specific behavior happens off-chain.

Architecture

Core contracts:

1. ParcelCore

• ERC-721 parcels with deterministic lifecycle states
• Immutable protocol fee (e.g. 0.5%)
• Support for platform-level BPS fee schedules
• Finalization window (e.g. 72h after pickup)

2. Escrow

• Holds ETH/ERC-20 funds keyed by parcelId
• Releases funds to carrier, protocol treasury, platform treasury, and finalizer tip
• Enforces deterministic payout logic

3. AStarSignerRegistryStaked

• (Optional) registers routing signers with stake
• Ties dropoff event to a verifiable off-chain route hash
• Allows eventual zkRoute integrations

All state transitions are public and auditable.
DeDe does not include any GPS, KYC, login systems, or metadata on-chain.

On-chain Privacy Model

• On-chain: only tokenId, state enum, and lifecycle timestamps
• Off-chain: pickup/dropoff locations, photo proofs, routing paths
• Metadata is stored in NFT, encrypted, or referenced via IPFS hashes
• Ethereum only sees a hash

What Makes DeDe Unique

• It’s a protocol, not a platform
• No centralized operator, job board, or trusted intermediary
• Anyone can build an app, mint a parcel, or pick one up
• Payments settle only if both sides confirm (or finalize automatically)
• Protocol fee is immutable, finalizer tip is capped, all logic is deterministic

No pricing engine.
No identity layer.
No assignment logic.
Just neutral rails.

Use Cases

• P2P delivery during commutes (side income for regular people)
• Local business delivery without contracts or apps
• Decentralized logistics experiments (DAOs, disaster relief, rural mobility)
• Trust-minimized gig networks in low-trust regions

Economics

• Protocol fee: immutable (e.g. 0.5%)
• Platform fee: configurable, set by each integrator
• Finalizer tip: small % (e.g. 0.05%), capped
• DeDe does not reduce escrow value over time (no built-in decay)
• Settlement is voluntary; payment is conditional on mutual confirmation

Why Ethereum?

DeDe works best when:

• The settlement layer is public, neutral, auditable
• Applications are permissionless and forkable
• The infrastructure isn’t subject to any central actor’s control

Deployed to Ethereum Mainnet

• ParcelCore: 0xeF1D4970c3B988840B13761Ec4FBb85106d789F8
• Escrow: 0x834317eFB2E6eE362a63474837398086cC302934
• AStarSignerRegistryStaked: 0x311A4c3Ed79D4467C55dd7CEE0C731501DF3f161
• protocolTreasury: 0x9C34d6a6BF1257A9e36758583cDC36F4cE2fA78F

Related Work / Inspiration

• Matrix (as infra for decentralized messaging)
• Monero (for privacy guarantees in adversarial environments)
• Tor / IPFS / Nostr (for neutrality under pressure)
• Ethereum itself (as settlement infrastructure)

Future Directions

• zkDeliveryProofs (optional: SNARKs for delivery receipt)
• L2 deployment for micropayments
• Local delivery DAO coordination
• Indexers / GraphQL APIs / “DeDeScan” explorer
• Mobile UX kits and white-label apps
• Monero bridge / atomic swaps for cross-chain delivery privacy

Source

MIT Licensed