The primary focus of the v0.38 release will be rolling out ABCI++ vote extensions and FinalizeBlock functionality.

• ABCI++ vote extensions & FinalizeBlock #9396
  • We need to improve our QA process during Q4 in order to reduce the amount of manual work involved
• Operators should have more control over bandwidth consumption
  • Investigate where Tendermint bandwidth is being consumed (perhaps capture this in an RFC as an articulation of the problem space)
  • Find short-term wins/low-hanging fruit where bandwidth consumption can be reduced (ideally in Q4 of 2022)
• mempool/p2p: Research implications of peer disconnect based on ResponseCheckTx #9546
• mempool: Deprecate the priority mempool #9388
• Short-term monitoring/logging improvements #9076
• Cut v0.38.x branch
• Cut release candidate
• docs: Enable build for v0.38.x branch
• Execute on the v0.38 release QA plan and capture the results #9921
  • Capture v0.37 baseline metrics (Optional, to do only if existing v0.37 metrics can't be reused)
  • qa: Capture v0.38 pre-release metrics
  • Validate that there's no meaningful, substantial regression from v0.37 to v0.38
• Execute on the QA plan for integration with the Cosmos SDK
• Cut final v0.38.0 release
  • docs: Ensure that the v0.38 version is available in the Vuepress config
• Prepare v0.38.1 release by merging all of blocked PRs on the project board