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Amesbury-based BankProv announced Tuesday that a soured $28 million loan to a bitcoin mining company will create a hit to its third-quarter earnings.

New York City-based Stronghold Digital Mining took out the equipment loan from BankProv and partner lender Arctos Credit in late June 2021, Stronghold said in an SEC filing. The loan’s collateral was around 26,000 of cryptocurrency mining rigs, computers used to create new units of cryptocurrency on the blockchain.

BankProv and NYDIG, the company that bought Arctos in April of this year, agreed to buy the computers from Stronghold in mid-August, according to Stronghold’s SEC filings in exchange for forgiving the loans, with the final set of computers arriving in BankProv’s and NYDIG’s hands last week.

The summer saw the values of many cryptocurrencies tumble amid stock market unease as investors fled riskier assets while inflation and Federal Reserve rate hikes ramped up. The value of bitcoin itself fell almost 10 percent nearly overnight in June and remains significantly down from its highs, and members of Congress, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calling the assets a risk to financial stability and encouraging more regulation.

The “crypto winter,” as some industry observers have termed the downturn, could make the cryptocurrency mining rigs now in BankProv’s possession worth substantially less.

BankProv, which rebranded from The Provident Bank and refocused its business on the cryptocurrency sector in 2020, said in a statement that the financial fallout from the loan’s collapse is still uncertain, but it will likely result in a loss. The bank hasn’t yet sold any of the cryptocurrency mining computers, and “is in the process of completing its evaluation of the write-down of the collateral and the impact on its consolidated financial statements as a whole.”