# Botan

# Development Roadmap

## Near Term Plans

Here is an outline of the development plans over the next ~12 months, as of February 2026.

## Botan2

As of 2025-01-01, Botan2 has reached end of life. No further releases are planned.

## Botan3

The following major feature work is currently planned for Botan3:

- SPAKE2+ password authenticated key exchange

- BLS12-381

- HPKE (RFC 9180)

- XMSS^MT

- HQC, possibly implemented using Rust

Along with the usual optimizations, bug fixes, and refinements.

## Botan4

Botan4 is currently planned for release in 2027.

See the current planning discussion in https://github.com/randombit/botan/issues/4666

Botan4 will continue using C++20 rather than adopting a more recent language version.

Botan4 is expected to be largely a subtractive major release; deprecated APIs and functionality will be removed, with few additions.

One notable change planned for Botan4 is that in that release, Public_Key will no longer derive from Private_Key. And similarly, specific private keys (for example RSA_PrivateKey) will no longer derive from their corresponding public key type.