Bridged Funds From ETH Mainnet to Arbitrum, Not Received After Several Hours?

Several hours is long for a deposit into Arbitrum, which normally completes in ten to fifteen minutes. The good news is that the money has not gone anywhere: it is locked in the bridge contract on Ethereum, and the only question is which step has not finished. In most cases the funds are already on Arbitrum and the wallet is looking in the wrong place.

Is it missing, or are you looking at the wrong screen?

Check this before anything else. MetaMask only shows the network it is currently on, so funds sitting on Arbitrum look like nothing at all while the app is pointed at Ethereum. Switch networks, and if the balance is still blank for a token such as USDC, add that token by hand - a wallet does not display a token it has not been told about. The explorer settles it: paste your address into Arbiscan and read what the chain says rather than what the app shows.

If the explorer shows nothing arrived

Then the delivery step has not run, and there are two ordinary reasons. Your Ethereum transaction may still be waiting to confirm because the fee was set low - look it up on Etherscan and you will see it pending rather than complete. Or, for a token deposit, the delivery message ran out of prepaid gas and is waiting for a manual Retry on the bridge site's history page. Connect the same wallet, find the deposit, press Retry, and it lands.

The case where nothing was wrong

If the funds arrived but you cannot move them, you have no ETH on Arbitrum to pay for gas. Bridged USDC sits there perfectly safe and completely immobile until a small amount of ETH arrives to pay the fee. It is like posting a parcel to a house with no letterbox. Send a few dollars of ETH across and everything works.

Next time, bridge a token you can afford to lose first, and keep a little ETH on every chain you use - it prevents most of these hours. Do not search for a support number, because the results are scams and the bridge has no support line that will message you. A stuck Arbitrum bridge transaction covers the Retry step in detail, and recovering a stuck cross-chain transfer is the wider version of this checklist.