You find MENA the way you find most good things in Kreuzberg: by walking past it twice. The address is Skalitzer Straße 114, but the venue isn't on Skalitzer — it's around the back, in a courtyard that does not announce itself. Tucked between Kottbusser Tor and Görlitzer Bahnhof, the house looks like something out of a book: three floors of yellow brick, a basement, a sunny attic, and two dancefloors that have spent a long time getting comfortable with low light.

For five days and five nights in June, MENA was, more or less, where Berlin Blockchain Week actually happened. WebZero didn't book the venue to host a conference. They booked it to host the part that comes after.

The official program of Berlin Blockchain Week — talks, panels, demo days, the usual — happened all over the city, in the buildings such things tend to happen in: glass, lanyards, white lighting. WebZero's contribution was the negative space. From June 13 to 17, MENA opened in the morning for brunches, slid into BBQs in the courtyard through the afternoon, ran workshops indoors when the sun got too sharp, and then, somewhere around the time the official events were issuing their last QR-code networking cards, became a club.

The programming was light on purpose. There were workshops upstairs that ran until they didn't, then dissolved into the BBQ. There was a DJ workshop in the basement that was, depending on the day, either three people learning to beatmatch or eight people watching one person learn to beatmatch.

The crowd was the predictable Blockchain Week mix — founders, devs, journalists, the occasional VC who'd lost their group — stretched, refreshed, and gently de-flattened by the venue. There is a specific look that crosses a foreigner's face when they discover what Berlin nightlife is on its home turf. "What do you mean you can smoke after 10pm indoors?" "You close at 4am? Alright, that's new." WebZero's team got used to seeing it.

"The point wasn't to compete with the conference," Dim Spirit, WebZero's creative director "The point was to give people somewhere to land at the end of the day. The conference makes you sharp. The courtyard puts you back together."

WebZero didn't program the place. WebZero held the door open and trusted the building to do the rest. Five days, five nights, one yellow-brick courtyard, no agenda, an unreasonable amount of charm.