The world faces serious challenges: widespread poverty, a global pandemic, approaching irreversible climate change, to name just a few. Today, a group of passionate individuals from across gaming and technology are ready to take constructive action while change is still possible. Announcing Leyline — a new and ambitious nonprofit platform to revolutionize how gaming communities connect to charitable causes to make a real difference in the world.
Leyline is creating a digital economy that enables anyone with a PC or mobile device to contribute to the causes they care about, while earning prizes that include digital gift cards and in-game items. Participants choose their causes from a growing number of focus areas, ranging from supporting research for COVID-19 to combating climate change, or even volunteering at the local level. Leyline believes that with over 2.7 billion gamers worldwide, even a sustained effort by a fraction could move mountains.
For each contribution made — whether donating idle processing power, volunteering time, giving blood, or something else — participants earn points in the Leyline Marketplace. These points can be exchanged for gift cards, digital codes, or in-game items for fan-favorite games. Points and items are tied to a user’s account and secured in a dedicated blockchain-based wallet, accessible only by that user.
Founded and led by Jeremy Dela Rosa, a former member of Blizzard Entertainment who has over two decades of tech and game industry experience, Leyline has over 50 staff and volunteers with backgrounds in video games, technology, politics, and education. Driven to make a meaningful change in this world, Dela Rosa bootstrapped Leyline by liquidating his retirement savings and selling his home. He is now pursuing corporate and private investments and charitable contributions, along with a GoFundMe campaign to scale the in-development Leyline platform.
“We have always been passionate about trying to make a big positive impact in the world,” said Jeremy Dela Rosa, Founder & CEO of Leyline. “We realize that everyone wants to contribute to making the world a better place, but it can be needlessly complex. Through Leyline, we want to create an online ecosystem that rewards doing good things in the real world.”
As a first significant step, Leyline has partnered with the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Formed in 2002, BOINC is an open platform that allows users to donate their unused PC or mobile device CPU resources to help create a distributed “supercomputer.” This computing power can then be used to crunch data, run massive calculations, and conduct complex models and simulations to accelerate scientific research, including a current focus on a cure for COVID-19. 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 is also supported by several industry-leading companies, including Geek Therapeutics, Nodwin Gaming, NZXT, and XIDAX, who have not only donated incentive items for platform contributors, but are also providing engineers, designers, and additional staff and services to help scale the nonprofit’s efforts.