Yes I am 100% sure the project is still alive, EK is doing a fine job. If you are not already a member of the Elastic Slack channel, I suggest joining there is a load of helpful information there and EK is very active.

Also you see in crypto you get noobs/trolls joining communication channels everyday asking the same questions here or on Slack like "where is roadmap or launch?" "Is this scam as no developments?" "I heard one dev left is project dead?" and they don't take 5 minutes to research anything because they are usually fucking idiots and want to be spoon-fed information. Having said this luckily there are many XEL supporters on Slack who answers these same questions nearly every single day.

With very little research anyone can see the commits on Github that EK is working on. I believe he also works locally on his own machine and doesn't update github with every slight change of code either. I truly believe at some point in the future he will have everything functioning. Although this could be months or years but either way EK isn't solely focused on making "investors" money so maybe if this worries anyone they should start looking at other projects to purely make returns. I think it is nice to have EK here that is trying to build something revolutionary and cares about the technology more than anything else, which is also the reason I think XEL will succeed.