Canary Capital CEO Steven McClurg has fueled the long-running privacy coin debate by labeling Zcash’s latest rally as a “pump and dump” squeeze while promoting Litecoin as his preferred privacy asset for regulated markets.
Litecoin better than Zcash?
In a series of to inform at After revisiting the project for the first time since 2016-2017, he wrote that he initially “believed in the Zcash story,” but ultimately came to two conclusions.
“Litecoin has a larger reach in terms of users, and MWEB is a simpler tool for selecting private wallets/transactions. It is my choice for privacy in the US or UK for compliance reasons,” he argued. By contrast, “ZEC is a pump and dump getting ready to pull the rug. Be careful out there,” he posted via X last week.
Via X, McClurg followed up by highlighting Zcash’s sharp turnaround on Monday. “Zcash [is] Down 50% since this post. I hope people saw that the post survived the rug pulling. There is one more step,” he wrote, attributing the move to “a stunt by bad actors.” He did not name specific counterparties, locations or structures, and his language focused on market behavior rather than protocol design.
Despite the harsh assessment of recent trading, McClurg emphasized that his criticism does not constitute a rejection of Zcash as a technology. “By the way, I have nothing against ZEC as it was the first coin with a private/public option,” he said. In the same thread, he described himself as “long-term bullish on Litecoin, Monero, Dash, and Zcash in that order,” explicitly putting ZEC last in his personal privacy stack, but still on the list.
The distinction he makes depends on the way privacy is implemented and how that interacts with compliance. Litecoin’s MimbleWimble Extension Block (MWEB) design adds an optional confidential layer in addition to the transparent base chain, allowing users to move coins to a separate privacy domain while keeping the overall supply auditable. That structure, plus Litecoin’s broader distribution and exchange support, supports McClurg’s claim that LTC is “my choice for privacy in the US or UK.”
Pressed on Monero’s role, McClurg said he hasn’t researched it “for a number of years” but that, based on previous work, he “always felt it would be the winning currency for people in authoritarian regimes. Pure privacy.” At the same time, he added that Monero “unfortunately probably doesn’t meet the demands of American citizens (not that it shouldn’t),” reflecting the tension between default privacy and current regulators’ expectations.
Zcash, with its dual transparent and shielded addressing system, has historically sat between these two poles. McClurg’s comments suggest that, in his view, ZEC’s recent rally and crash reflect structural weaknesses in the way the market around the asset behaves, even as the underlying cryptography remains important.
He concluded by warning that he hopes “this stunt by bad actors has not damaged the importance of privacy chains and privacy features,” underscoring that his target is speculative excesses rather than the broader drive for financial privacy within the chain.
At the time of writing, ZEC was trading at $324.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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