1️⃣-Message Format

Overview

All messages sent between nodes have headers. The initial handshake messages are sent unencrypted, and all other messages are encrypted and authenticated using the keys that are generated during the initial handshake.

All messages payloads are serialized using Protocol Buffers.

Protocol buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You can find documentation on the Google Developers site.

To develop with protocol buffers you will need to install the protocol buffer compiler (to compile .proto files) and the protocol buffer runtime for your chosen programming language.

Protocol buffers currently support development in Java, Python, Go, Rust, C, C++, Objective-C, C#, Dart, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, Javascript, and more.

The unencrypted message

Size (bytes)

Name

Data Type

Description

4

magic

uint32

Magic value to specify the message's network

4

length

uint32

Payload length

4

type

uint32

Message type

4

checksum

uint32

First 4 bytes of sha256 hash of JSON-serialized message

length

payload

bytes

The actual data

Magic values

Network

Magic value

mainnet

0xd9b4bef9

testnet

0x0709110b

simnet

0x12141c16

regnet

0xdab5bffa

The encrypted message

Size (bytes)

Name

Data Type

Description

4

length

uint32

Length of the payload

length

ciphertext

bytes

The encrypted data

Ciphertext pre-encryption format

Size (bytes)

Name

Data Type

Description

4

length

uint32

Payload length

4

type

uint32

Message type

length

payload

bytes

The actual data

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