Given a RAW Transaction - how to get senders address

Question

Is it possible to get the senders address using golang when all you have is the raw transaction string. I can decode it and get the nonce, hash, to etc as these are all exported functions from the types.Transactions package but I cant seem to find a way to get the actual senders address (using golang) Javascript has some functions for doing so - I should also state that I need to do this in a standalone script rather than being connected to a node (if possible)

Answer 1

Here's a full working example of how to decode a raw transaction and read the sender (from) address:

package main

import (
    "encoding/hex"
    "fmt"
    "log"

    "github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/core/types"
    "github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/rlp"
)

func main() {
    rawTx := "f86d8202b28477359400825208944592d8f8d7b001e72cb26a73e4fa1806a51ac79d880de0b6b3a7640000802ca05924bde7ef10aa88db9c66dd4f5fb16b46dff2319b9968be983118b57bb50562a001b24b31010004f13d9a26b320845257a6cfc2bf819a3d55e3fc86263c5f0772"

    tx := new(types.Transaction)
    rawTxBytes, err := hex.DecodeString(rawTx)
    rlp.DecodeBytes(rawTxBytes, &tx)

    msg, err := tx.AsMessage(types.NewEIP155Signer(tx.ChainId()))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    fmt.Println(msg.From().Hex())
    // 0x96216849c49358B10257cb55b28eA603c874b05E
}

See this transaction in etherscan

Answer 2

Just to update this answer, there is a requirement parameter on the AsMessage call. you need to pass a base fee, though the transaction is a free on, place a big int 0 into the call as shown below:

msgFrom, _ := tx.AsMessage(types.NewEIP2930Signer(tx.ChainId() ),big.NewInt(1) )

Answer 3

we can use go to pick out the senders' address from raw tx as below sample code

        if msg, err := tx.AsMessage(types.NewEIP155Signer(big.NewInt(1))); err == nil {
            fmt.Println(msg.From().Hex())
        } else {
            fmt.Println(err.Error())
        }

and depend on the chainId get out from the raw tx, then you can decide which signer need to use

// Depending on the presence of the chain ID, sign with EIP155 or homestead
if chainID != nil {
    return types.SignTx(tx, types.NewEIP155Signer(chainID), key.PrivateKey)
}
return types.SignTx(tx, types.HomesteadSigner{}, key.PrivateKey)

-- or, we can simple get sender from tx as below code

        signer := types.NewEIP155Signer(tx.ChainId())
        sender, err := signer.Sender(tx)
        if err != nil {
            fmt.Printf("sender: %v", sender.Hex())
        }

Hope this help!

Answer 4

You should use

types.LatestSignerForChainID()

instead of legacy EIP 155 signer. Curtesy to https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues/23890#issuecomment-966794849

Answer 5

Above solutions are all incredibly expensive methods if you are doing them at scale given the amount of RPC-calls you have to make.

I found this method to be the cheapest when you already have the normal *types.Transaction:

func getFromCheap(tx *types.Transaction) string {
    blockFeeFake := big.NewInt(10838863023) // For the from address it does not matter if you have the right number here
    fromAddr, _ := tx.AsMessage(types.LatestSignerForChainID(tx.ChainId()), blockFeeFake)
    return fromAddr.From().String()
}

This returns the "From" address as a string without any RPC calls. The fastest / most efficient way to get transactions is to:

1. Get a block // You can save the baseFee here if you want.
2. Get the Txs.
3. Use above function to get "From" at scale.