Raiden has fallen short on delivering a workable system and has had funding issues... most people people in the ethereum space are now banking on rollups filling these use cases (a competing approach for low-cost transactions)

Though certainly I'd be pleasantly surprised if Raiden still pulls through on their plans at some point.

Raiden has many issues, but funding is not one of them. Part of the hiring pitch from Brainbot was that the ICO got them funds to finance their operation for a decade at least.

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.

So happy to see actual discussion of cryptocurrency concepts and not just visceral hate for all things crypto on hacker news. New line it looks like you guys have really turned a corner I'm proud of you hacker news.