Though certainly I'd be pleasantly surprised if Raiden still pulls through on their plans at some point.
Speaking as someone who worked on Raiden's core team last year and spent a reasonable part of this year working on a project received a grant from the Raiden Trust [0], the last release is workable, but still requires a lot of elbow grease and knowledge of the protocol to get it running. End users will certainly have a better shot when the light client gets parity to the reference implementation and gets a mainnet release.
In any case, I just wanted to point out that Raiden is a project that is related to what OP asked about and that is still alive and kicking.
[0]: https://hub20.io, a self-hosted payment gateway that integrates with Raiden and abstracts all its complexity from the users and node operators to enable fast and near-instant transactions.