Crowdfunding academic research with cryptocurrencies is in fact excellent idea. When you have collected enough funds, applicants can present their research ideas and crowdfunders can vote on which they want to fund.
indeed, and when you do a crowdfunding campaign you want donors, and non-donor supporters to help with the endeavor. each project takes lots of effort from very many directions.
As you do the work you will find that everything counts, not just the money, but the efforts as well.
I'm aware that also academic people themselves are very tired in the current system, and there is already a one p2p research crowdfunding system going on, but that's still in fiats only and internal to a certain university. But the p2p foundation has already funded few research programs and the the results are much better than the usual "publish-or-perish-nullstudies" that the hierarchic establishment mostly produces.