Buying and selling on Marketplace and WhatsApp · South Africa
Your money waits in a vault, not with the seller, until you’ve checked the item. Delivery is paid both ways, so if it’s rubbish it goes straight back. You tap OK, the seller gets paid.
PROOF OF CONCEPT · PRE-REGULATORY · INSIDER TEST 2026
The bad choice
Send the full amount to someone you have never met, then wait to see whether a parcel arrives.
The item is right and the price is fair, and the deal still dies, because nobody wants to send money first.
GoSafe removes that choice. Your money stops in a vault on the way to the seller, and only moves on after you’ve checked the item.
Three kinds of deal
A console, a bike, a phone. You pay into the vault. The parcel arrives, you check it in the time you both agreed (three hours is the usual), you tap OK. Not what you bought? It goes back and the courier is already paid. Change your mind for no reason and the return is on you.
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The seller sticks a small tag on the item and taps it with a phone. When it arrives, you tap the same tag. The deal closes, and you get a record that says this one is yours, dated to the moment.
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Your money is in the vault before you two even meet, so no tyre-kickers and no cash in hand: handover in daylight, at a public place. And before any money moves, the car gets checked: do the numbers match the papers, is it still owed to a bank, is it wanted by the police. Owed? The bank is paid first. Wanted? The deal stops dead.
Read the story →How it works
GoSafe is AI-orchestrated escrow for person-to-person sales on Facebook Marketplace and WhatsApp, in rand. It is designed so the buyer’s money waits in a bank-controlled vault until delivery is verified, then is released to the seller: a bank-controlled account today; connecting with a bank is the plan (in build). The AI agent orchestrates the deal over WhatsApp; neither GoSafe nor its agent holds funds. Everything below is how the proof of concept runs on emulators today.
Two strangers agree a deal on Marketplace or WhatsApp. The buyer pays by EFT into a bank-controlled vault (in build). The seller sees that the money is held, and ships.
The courier is paid half by the buyer and half by the seller, and both legs, out and back, are prepaid up front. If the item comes back because it is not as described, nobody argues about who pays the courier. If the buyer keeps the item, the unused return leg is credited back 50/50 to both parties. A return for no reason, with the item as described, is at the buyer’s cost. From the courier’s pickup scan to the delivery scan, loss or damage is for the courier’s account; courier insurance can be taken out.
The inspection window is agreed by both parties at deal creation (default three hours; from a few hours to a couple of days) and runs from the courier’s delivery scan. Within it the buyer confirms with a one-time code (OTP) sent to GoSafe. The courier’s delivery event arrives by API. Neither one alone moves money.
Release needs two operations approvers (one person cannot approve twice) and produces a bank-verifiable evidence pack: the code, the courier events, the approvals and a slice of the audit chain.
Every deal mints a digital title record, timestamped with OpenTimestamps: a Bitcoin-anchored proof that the record existed at that moment. It is the certificate pattern Attesté uses for artworks, lifted into GoSafe. A timestamped, verifiable record, not a claim of legal effect beyond that.
In the tag scenario the seller fixes an NFC tag to the item and scans it, which binds the tag to the title record. The buyer scans the same tag on receipt. Tag scan plus the courier’s delivery confirmation conclude the deal, and the buyer holds an OpenTimestamps certificate of title: proof of ownership and provenance.
For a car, GoSafe is designed to run a TransUnion vehicle verification before the deal can conclude: registration, VIN and engine number must match; outstanding finance and police-interest flags decide what follows. Financed: split release, financier first. Police interest or mismatch: hard block. The buyer’s money is confirmed received in the vault before the two parties meet, which also keeps tyre-kickers and lowballers away; the handover happens in daylight at a public place, and nobody carries cash. In the proof of concept the verification adapter is mocked; no live data source is connected today.
A free “check before you pay” agent on WhatsApp, not live yet. As designed: forward the listing and the chat screenshots, get a risk read. It will hold no money, judges the transaction and never the person, says “lower risk” and never a promise, and purges screenshots after assessment. A privacy notice for it will be published before it processes anything.
Zero rand: the amount the agent can move. Structurally zero: there is no tool in the agent’s hands that touches funds. A red-team suite scripts a model to try every trick, and the money path stays deterministic.
The long-form answers, including data and POPIA, are in the FAQ.
Register interest
It has been built and verified on emulators; the next step is a small test with named insiders only. Leave your details if you want to hear when that changes, as a buyer, a seller, a courier, or a bank.
