As much as I hate bitcoin and blockchain and think that the technology is simply not very useful outside of speculation (+ bad from ecology point of view + slow + unsalable + often a simple database can be better + ...), the one argument that they they say I agree on. Transparency.
Clearing houses do not provide any real information what they do. Supposedly they are regulated, but nobody really seems to look under the rug - which seems to have a lot of dead bodies (anyone remembers the Clearstream scandals?).
DTCC was accused multiple times during the Gamestop saga for allowing naked short selling + for allowing "fail to deliver" all the time. And the worst is that we really dont know. There were no real investigations, no real audits, no information provided to the general public. We are supposed to "trust" the clearing house, but without the ability to verify what it is doing. So how can we know what they are doing? The things we have dont really show what they are doing; also different thing is that they can claim to do one thing, but do something different in reality.
I bet that clearing houses are allowing naked shorts all the time, because nobody can really control it. Are there any programmers doing complicated code reviews with sys admins? The "big four" audits are a joke, they check some papers, of things that supposedly happened or did not happen.
Audits are done by accounting by graduates, who barely understand basics of accounting and here we talk about inspecting complicated software of some clearing house that does a million things per second. Everything is done inside some complicated operatically tool - and I doubt big 4 has any chance to understand it, if even they investigate it, because probably it is outside of scope - they just investigate the print outs, or Excel files "provided by customer". Everyone who works in finance knows that audits are a joke; the auditors barely understand what normal things are doing - and they can barely keep up with the financial part; here we talk about actual checking if the business side isnt cheating somehow inside its software.
A clearing house can just run two sets of books; also how can anyone know it isnt front-running, or naked shorting? There is a lot of money on the table in that and I bet someone tried to skim some of it from time to time. And as I said, we will never know, since this information is hidden from public. We dont really have any way to check it and very doubt if those who check really do.