With the implementation of Timely Vote Credits (TVC) on Solana mainnet-beta starting from Epoch 703 (November 26, 2024 07:57:15 UTC), vote latency is now integrated into how we measure how effective a validator is on Solana.

Vote latency is the slot distance between the slot being voted for and the slot where the vote transaction lands. With the implementation of TVC, the protocol now rewards validators based on latency accordingly.

A validator that correctly votes within two (2) slots for the slot it is voting for will get the maximum 16 vote credits. For every slot that a validator delays its vote, it gets one (1) less vote credit, until such that it can only get the minimum of one (1). This means that at 18 slots of worth of latency or more, as long as a validator's vote is correct and is no later than 512 slots, it gets the minimum vote credit.

As such we assign a vote_score for every correct vote based on the vote credits it receives. We then multiply the total number of confirmed blocks by 16 to get the maximum possible vote credits such that the voting effectiveness rating is:

voting effectiveness = vote_score / (total number of confirmed blocks * 16)

We have reflected this change in our methodology docs, under Version 2.0 of the Solana Validator Effectiveness Rating.