Vitalik Buterin: The core challenges of blockchain scaling are, in order, computation, data, and state.

ChainCatcher reported that Vitalik Buterin published an article explaining his layered understanding of blockchain scalability, pointing out that the difficulty of scaling blockchains increases in the order of computation, data, and state.

Vitalik stated that computation is the easiest to scale, which can be achieved through parallelization, introducing "hints" provided by block builders, or replacing large amounts of computation with proofs such as zero-knowledge proofs. Data scalability is of medium difficulty; if the system requires data availability guarantees, this requirement cannot be avoided, but it can be optimized by splitting data, using erasure coding (such as PeerDAS), and supporting "graceful degradation," meaning that even when nodes have limited data capacity, they can still generate blocks of corresponding size.

In contrast, state is the most difficult part to scale. Vitalik pointed out that to verify even a single transaction, nodes need the full state; even if the state is abstracted as a tree and only the root node is stored, updating this root still depends on the complete state. Although there are methods to split the state, they usually require major architectural adjustments and are not universal solutions.

Based on this, Vitalik concluded: If it is possible to replace state with data without introducing new centralization assumptions, this should be prioritized; similarly, if it is possible to replace data with computation without introducing new centralization assumptions, this should also be seriously considered.