Beyond hype: the role of signal coherence in liquidity and market-making for NFTs

Premium non-fungible token (NFT) collections often fail to attract liquidity, while modest but coherent ones thrive, presenting an anomaly that classical signaling cannot explain. We reframe market-making as a coordination problem and introduce a Brand × Topology × Dispersion (BTD) framework, arguing that participation follows weakest-link clarity: the least clear signal dimension, not the average, governs action. A high-realism 2 × 2 × 2 experiment (N = 336) shows that brand capital, ownership topology, and value dispersion each raise willingness to trade, yet the minimum across them dominates conversion; discordant signals depress engagement more than concordant signals lift it; and signals act as complements in thin markets but substitutes in mature ones. A 6-month Ethereum panel, analyzed with fractional logit and Cox hazard models, replicates these patterns in the field. The studies extend signaling theory from dyadic quality revelation to multilateral coordination and yield a bottleneck-governance principle for marketers and platforms, suggesting that the weakest clarity dimension be repaired first.