Cryptography means cryptocurrency because that's what virtually every cryptographer was trying to achieve: cryptographically-secured interactions between people.

And economic interactions are the most impactful ones. Note that (Open)SSL was created when people really wanted to make CC payments over the internet.

Also: a lot of cryptographic protocols require some censorship-resistant publication medium. Wanna rotate keys and retire old ones? You need some sort of distributed transparency log. Want a human-readable name that escapes Zooko's triangle? Also need a log. These things did not exist until people got used to blockchains. Even CT log for TLS arrived only after Bitcoin, even though it does not require no mining or currency.