1.AnchorUSD
2.Their trust company where escrow is held
3.Zap for lightning network wallet
4.Abacus for identity verification
5.and you (sparkswap)
I'd say this is neither direct nor instant (just abacus verification adds crazy friction). And the trust issue is real, I'd personally feel better with one large custodial institution than a number of startups in this chain that I know nothing about (or their security practices).
If you can solve that there is market for sure.
Both Zap and the Sparkswap app are open source, which should reduce some of the trust you have to place in them.
The trust issue with fiat is difficult to get around, with both Sparkswap and any other service that interacts with the traditional financial system. By removing custody of at least the Bitcoin side of the transaction, we think we're taking a step in the right direction.
Overall your feedback is well-taken - there is certainly more we can do to reduce the number of steps and different pieces of software / service providers that users need to interact with to use Sparkswap.
You're correct in other ways as well:
The "lightning" network (heh) still requires slow Bitcoin transactions to initiate and close. And it's between two trusted parties anyway, so this negates the need for a trustless network like Bitcoin.
A far better "lightning network" has existed for many years. It's called a shared SQL database.
The lightning network couldn't be built without having a lower level trustless party. Bitcoin actually lets us bootstrap trust.
More thoughts on bootstrapping trust:
https://www.nemil.com/crypto/why-cryptocontracts-matter.html