paramiko.ed25519key

[nilamo]

That's just a semantics issue, of the library being particular about what you give it. Calling .encode() on the hex string will convert it to a bytes string. They'll have the same content, but it'll be a "bytes" to make the library happy.

>>> import base64
>>> key = 'RLhdtbhVbFXUeqZh6jm0t5ToI6b4IGbac8R2EkP+Ido='
>>> text = base64.b64decode(key).hex()
>>> text
'44b85db5b8556c55d47aa661ea39b4b794e823a6f82066da73c4761243fe21da'
>>> text.encode()
b'44b85db5b8556c55d47aa661ea39b4b794e823a6f82066da73c4761243fe21da'