Is the idea of color coins/open assets still alive? Are there any interesting projects ahead on this way? Since Ethereum has taken the way for smart contracts, it seems to me that the color coins projects have been abandoned in favour of the Ethereum ecosystem. But I might be wrong. Are there any interesting projects still for this approach?
There are at least 5 different colored coins implementations on bitcoin that I'm aware of. The ones in active development include:


Colu - They recently showed how their implementation can be used with the lightning network. https://www.colu.com/
Chromaway - They've been running a lot of pilots with various banks and whatnot. http://chromaway.com/


There's also a slack channel for colored coins as well, which you can see here: http://coloredcoins.org/

So no, it's not dead and there's still plenty of development going on.