According to Maecenas CEO Marcelo Garcia-Casil, this allows original owners to maintain partial ownership of a work as its value grows, and opens up the market to younger investors.

"What we're doing with the fractionalization or tokenization of art is creating a stock market experience when it comes to investing in art," he said.

"We're not going with this platform to art experts — we're bringing it to people who may be investing in art for the first time."

Art without a home

There's an obvious drawback to selling art in this way. With multiple owners and no single home for the works, they're often stored in restricted areas that are not accessible to the public.

But some investors say the art market is perfectly suited to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

"You have ownership, it's censorship resistant, it's portable and the monetary supply [is finite]," Drijkoningen explained. "There will only ever be 20 million of them [bitcoin]."

Singapore's crypto-revolution

Maecenas is part of a much bigger revolution underway in financial technology, and Singapore is playing a leading role, according to Lunex principal Tushar Agarwal.

"Singapore does an amazing job of attracting that talent, of making sure that they don't inhibit innovation for the sake of regulating," he said.

Agarwal says the industry will continue to grow because traditional finance is unable to keep up with the speed of globalized markets.

"The amount of time that it takes for [banks] to settle transactions just hasn't kept up with the pace that is required," he said. "Yes, it's highly highly volatile — but that's the risk that you take with any new industry... it's like the Wild West."