Hi Gophers,
I’m excited to announce the v1.1.0 release of go-monblob – a pure Go, zero-dependency library for parsing and serializing Monero transaction binary blobs (tx_blob).
Repository: https://github.com/cexpepe/go-monblob
Documentation: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/cexpepe/go-monblob
The Problem It Solves
If you’ve ever worked with Monero in Go, you’ve likely encountered the same frustration: there is no standalone, well-maintained library that handles transaction blob parsing. Existing Go libraries like go-monero and go-xmr-lib are great for RPC communication, but blob parsing is typically a side feature—often incomplete, tied to specific RPC versions, or not maintained as an independent component.
The result? Developers end up reading Monero’s C++ source code (cryptonote_basic.h) and re-implementing the binary format from scratch. This leads to fragmentation, subtle bugs, and duplicated effort across projects.
go-monblob aims to fill this gap by providing a clean, well-tested, and performant translation layer between byte and structured transaction data.
What It Does
go-monblob follows CNS003 and Monero v0.18+ specifications, adopting a “precise prefix parsing + raw signature retention” strategy to support all transaction versions (V1/V2) and all RingCT types (0–5).
Core API:
tx, err := monblob.Parse(blob) // byte → Transaction
blob, err := monblob.Serialize(tx) // Transaction → byte
txid := tx.Hash() // Keccak-256(prefix)
prefix, _ := monblob.ParsePrefix(blob) // prefix only (no signatures)
Key Features:
Zero external dependencies – only uses the Go standard library (plus golang.org/x/crypto/sha3 for Keccak-256)
Full parsing & serialization – supports Transaction and TransactionPrefix with complete round‑trip support
Lossless round‑trips – signature blocks (including RingCT) are kept as raw bytes
High performance – parses 100,000+ typical transactions (\~2KB) per second on a single core
Production‑ready security – built‑in recursion depth, slice size, and memory limits to prevent DoS attacks
Fuzz testing – native Go fuzz tests continuously verify robustness
Streaming support – ParseFromReader and SerializeToWriter for handling large data
Project Status
Version: v1.1.0 (stable, tagged)
Test Coverage: \~79% (Codecov)
License: MIT
Go Version: 1.24+
The library is already being used in production environments and has been tested against real mainnet transactions.
How You Can Help
I’m looking for:
Code reviews – feedback on API design and implementation
Adoption – if you’re building anything in Go that touches Monero transactions, please consider using this library
Issues – open an issue if you find edge cases or missing features
The goal is to establish a common, reliable foundation for Monero transaction handling in Go—so we can all stop rewriting parsers.
Check it out: https://github.com/cexpepe/go-monblob
Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!