Are any USD based stablecoins giving the risk free yield?  Currently sitting at ~2%

Define risk-free

There is a non 0 risk of interacting with any smart contracts relative to holding money in a bank account

Good point I was referring to a service that would take USDC and deposit into something like VMFXX so underlying deposits are safe.  You still have smart contract risk

I personally like to stablefarm instead of using a vault. Balancer is currently 6% on USDC/USDT/DAI on Arbitrum. For a vault I saw 3% on Alchemix the other day but front end isn’t loading for me rn

Interesting … I doubt they are buying VMFXX though and probably lending?  Anything over 2% would indicate a higher risk.  I’ve been contemplating a USD stable coin that auto invests in VMFXX and returns the yield to the holder on a monthly basis

In an efficient market a higher return means higher risk. But crypto as a whole is extremely inefficient so if you find the right things you can maximize your risk adjusted returns. Alcx optimizes yearn which optimizes aave and compound. So you have 3x smart contract risk there