2nd layer services can be just as decentralized and trustless as first level services. Pretty much everything @yabapmatt said on marky's post is true, and the main issue is ensuring that there's some kind of incentive system to make sure that people have a good reason to operate 2nd layer API nodes. This is definitely something that's being factored into our design.
RE: Updated on BlockTrades Hive work (as of Dec 9th 2020)