2020 has been a hard time for many, but the video game industry has managed to thrive. Now, a new nonprofit is looking to give gamers an incentive to make the world a better place.
Leyline will offer rewards like gift cards and in-game items in exchange for charitable deeds such as giving blood and donating time, which it can verify when you link your Leyline account with your accounts for the associated charities. You can also give and earn by donating your idle computer processing power, which can help researchers dealing with crises like COVID-19 and climate change.
Former Blizzard Entertainment employee Jeremy Dela Rosa founded Leyline by liquidating his retirement savings and selling his home. The nonprofit has over 50 staff, including those with experience in politics, education, gaming, and technology.
“We realize that everyone wants to contribute to making the world a better place, but it can be needlessly complex,” Dela Rosa said. “Through Leyline, we want to create an online ecosystem that rewards doing good things in the real world.”
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing has become one of Leyline’s first major partners. It is through BOINC that Leyline users will be able to donate their computer processing power. “By harnessing the combined power of even one percent of the world’s gaming population, Leyline users could contribute 7,800 petaflops — each petaflop equates to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second — of distributed research computing power,” Leyline noted.
Geek Therapeutics, Nodwin Gaming, NZXT, and XIDAX are among some other companies lending incentive items and expertise to Leyline’s new venture. Leyline has also started a GoFundMe page to help further develop its platform.
