The sale was the first by ’s to accept payment in a digital currency. The reported buyer was a Singapore-based financier behind a crypto-based fund called Metapurse. Known only as Metakovan, he has already puchased a number of works by Beeple for around $2.2 million. After “fractionalising” them to open up crypto ownership, the works now have a market value of around $230 million, according to Coinmarketcap, which tracks digital assets.

All this suggests that the art market is opening up in directions that may worry traditionalists, but it shows the potential for expanding the asset class and drawing in young artists and collectors comfortable with the medium and its rising digital talent.

A more immediate concern for the industry, however, is meeting tough new anti-money laundering disclosures. Although the 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) came into law over a year ago, COVID disruptions have set a new deadline of 10 June for registering with HMRC as an art market participant and grappling with all the risks associated with buying and selling high-value art under the new regime. The new compliance demands much stronger monitoring and transparent record-keeping for any artwork sold for €10,000 (£8,500) or more.

A consortium of UK arts organisations has launched a free nationwide training programme to help galleries and artists comply with the new rules.Those behind it say that breaching them will bring heavy financial penalties.

“The arts will be under greater scrutiny as a sector after the June deadline and HMRC will be looking to make examples of those not following the new rules," Nicola Finnerty, partner at , agrees that the new regime has changed the way sales are conducted.

“Yes, there are some people who choose to operate with a degree of secrecy when they purchase their artworks, mainly because they don’t want their families or their premises to be targeted for their wealth, whether through theft or associated crimes.”

“However, in my experience the vast majority of the art market is transparent about what they do. And the introduction of this regulation is a positive step, because it mandates processes and record-keeping that will unequivocally demonstrate that.”

Around $1.7 trillion of art sits in private hands, with a fair proportion never coming out of secret storage locations. Owning and managing it is a complex business often relying on a host of experts that may have their individual agendas. Due to a lack of regulation, the market is also highly manipulated. It is estimated that around 40 per cent of art in circulation is forged or misattributed, and this is a conservative estimate.

Whether the additional rules will have the desired effect, Gleave from Fladgate is less certain. "People who want to launder money, launder money. I don’t mean that in a flippant way. People who buy and sell art do need to be more vigilant,” and "due diligence is critical, always has been" she said. But some of the new requirements could be a step too far.

"For smaller galleries that may have dealt with the same clients for years, suddenly asking them for their bank statements and where they got the money to buy the art, you can see relationships faltering," Gleave said. "Then again, if there is supply and demand, people are going to have to get over it,” she said.

Her previous firm Hunters Law set up a mediation committee to resolve disputes because "the last thing collectors want is litigation," Gleave said. (She spoke to this service before she left to join Fladgate earlier this year.) “As soon as you litigate over a piece of art, it is burnt,” and that is bad for everyone, she said.

Some in the sector believe that the extra layers of compliance and transparency provided by the new AML measures will help modernise the market and make it more attractive as an asset class to institutional investors. The use of blockchain, as the Christie's sale demonstrated, is no longer on the margins of reforming practices.

“Prior to the start of the pandemic, very little of the art market was conducted online or centralised," Axa XL's Bentley said.

“Whereas people had tended to rely only on email, today they increasingly have online sales portals. Yet when you buy an artwork, you’re still buying a physical item that tends to be shipped to you, along with the supporting information for provenance and valuation, which more often than not are physical documents or scans of those documents,” coming from different sources, he said.

“Given how the pandemic has accelerated the modernisation of the art market, we’re seeing increasing numbers of businesses starting up ancillary to the art market, which can help businesses fulfil their obligations under this new legislation."