I'm not sure how much educational institutions depend on Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) services but I would imagine many institutions send at least some things to online students (lab kits, maybe - I once signed up for an Athabasca course specifically to get a plastic model of a human brain (which, sadly, I never got)). Current LMD depends on everything from Canada Post to FedX to Uber. But as the authors write in this article (13 page PDF), "the current generation of LMD platforms that leverage crowd-shipping are centralized platforms and behave as intermediaries that charge commission fees." This is bad because "they lack transparency, and most of them, if not all, are platform monopolies in the making." So in this paper the authors propose an alternative, distributed, blockchain-based model "by introducing a decentralized reputation model that executes over a cryptocurrency-less blockchain network... to decentralize the crowd economy."
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