Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a hierarchical approach to blockchain scalability, prioritizing computation, data, and state. Buterin suggests that computation is the easiest to scale through parallelization, block builder hints, or replacing extensive computation with proofs. Data scalability is more challenging, requiring data availability guarantees, but can be managed through sharding, erasure codes like PeerDAS, and progressive degradation, which involves producing smaller blocks when node bandwidth or storage is limited. State scalability is the most difficult, as verifying transactions typically requires a complete state. While architectural changes can help, they are not universally applicable. Buterin emphasizes prioritizing data over state and computation over data, provided it does not introduce new centralization risks.