One thing is that proper public cryptographers are very rare, there's a handful of effective teams - e.g. MIT has Rivest and associates, there are a bunch of other places, but most universities, including quite serious ones, don't have anyone doing reasonable cryptographic research. Cryptocurrencies caused a recent boom, but it's a niche with separate, specific goals that doesn't advance the rest of the field much.

It's hard to give good numbers, we'd have to look at Snowden leaks and others, but I haven't done much about that. Here's an earlier HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6338094 that estimates 600 proper mathemathic researchers working on crypto, and it seems quite plausible to me that it would be more research power than the entire public academia - especially because in many countries who do take this field seriously (e.g. China, Russia, Iran) there's no real public research in crypto happening because that's classified by default. I mean, prety much all academic research happens through targeted grants by governments, and who other than deparment of defence (or similar organizations in other countries) would be funding cryptographic research?

Also, I'll quote Bruce Shneier (2013, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/09/how_advance...) regarding their budget - "According to the black budget summary, 35,000 people and $11 billion annually are part of the Department of Defense-wide Consolidated Cryptologic Program. Of that, 4 percent—or $440 million—goes to 'Research and Technology.' That's an enormous amount of money; probably more than everyone else on the planet spends on cryptography research put together."