It seems that when the database is updated and receives a new version token the unmarshalling is not done correctly.
Expected: Cg0IARAGGAEiAzAwMTABEP/7BhoCGAnR73ir
unmarshalled: [10 13 8 1 16 6 24 1 34 3 48 48 49 48 1 16 255 251 6 26 2 24 9 209 239 120 171]
This could be an issue with https://godoc.org/github.com/golang/protobuf/jsonpb itself.
I created the branch json-marshalling-bug for future investigation, meanwhile i am going to revert the changes that introduced this bug.