Their approach is different.
Durov's team try to achieve "everything at once", create some kind of a "supernova" on the market.
Universa chose to act "slowly but steadily" - implement the platform on a lesser scale, and than gradually gain more and more support and adoption.
Well, I can't say anything good about the first method - if you don't show anything for a long time, it generally means that something went wrong. Community doen't like to wait. At all.
I don't wanna say that TON is scam, but project that spend so much time in "secret development" usually are not so impressive as the audience hope them to be.