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CHs manage & process the risk associated with leveraged products like futures & swaps. If you trade with an OTC counterparty you take on default risk (your counterparty may not be able to pay if you win). CHs are valuable because they always pay.

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of one of these users. Remember, we want to blow up this CH network. How do we do it? We need to take on a ton of leverage & lose it all. Massive unpaid losses are a CH's Kryptonite.

CHs have strict margin limits & settle positions daily, sometimes more frequently. We can't just waltz right up to the front door and ask for billions of $. To lose enough money to bring down a clearinghouse, we need a combination of laziness, secrecy, and luck.

On the laziness front, we need an OTC counterparty (like a bank) to not care about giving us extreme off-exchange margin for a trade. Think Bill Hwang - Credit Suisse levels of margin on an equity total return swap, for example. If our OTC trade goes south we can lose billions.

Now, secrecy - we go to the clearinghouse (CME Clearing, for example) and open a futures position with max leverage. CME doesn't know about our OTC trade & we don't mention it. Leverage + leverage = the makings of a CH blowup.

Lastly, we need luck. A TON of luck. First, our OTC trade needs to go wrong & produce billions of losses in a single trading day. Then our CH position needs to go wrong AT THE SAME TIME, again in a single trading day. CME and our bank won't be able to settle in time.