Is ECA dead deep in the abyss ?
No one to tell some little hope about it

Well - as long as nobody is going to pick up the project, it can't go far... the Team that was formed out of a supporting community has left to a new coin called
electra protocol with the ticker XEP
The original founder was not very active for a long time
So - who is going to go forward with it... without active people - no way to the moon..,

In my experience, for an altcoin to truly die or be close to death one of the following must happen:
1) No one mining/staking so the blockchain stops.
2) Consistently 0 USD daily volume or getting delisted from all exchanges/Coinmarketcap.
3) A big error in the code that no one bothers to fix.
4) Cease and desist orders from the USA targeting a specific altcoin.
5) Source code and wallet downloads becoming inaccessible to users.
As long as these do not happen the project will be alive. The first year Electra was founded we came close to 1, 2 and 3 but remained alive nonetheless and on top of that, for reasons still unknown to me, pumped 500x in a month. Some people consider code updates necessary for the survival of a coin but there are successful coins out there like Dogecoin that do not update the code frequently. Electra’s code is unique among altcoins due to the consensus mechanism that does not exist in any other project.
Bear in mind, competition is much fiercer. When Electra was created there were around 700 coins and now there are 10,000+. Many with 10,000,000 USD+ budgets! Time will tell how Electra will fare. For me Electra is in the same league as Blackcoin, Peercoin, Litecoin, Maxcoin, Icebergcoin and Boolberry etc. The league of 2nd generation Bitcoin based altcoins with one or more unique features. Some have obviously fared better than others.