According to Reuters, Venezuelan small and medium-sized enterprises are facing a severe U.S. dollar shortage crisis due to American sanctions and exclusion from the official foreign exchange allocation system, with over half of surveyed enterprises stating that foreign exchange scarcity has seriously hindered production. It is reported that against the backdrop of a 13% year-over-year decline in foreign exchange auction scale at the beginning of the year, the majority of U.S. dollar allocations are monopolized by large multinational enterprises. To maintain production, numerous local pharmaceutical and chemical companies have been forced to turn to unofficial markets or use cryptocurrency for cross-border raw material procurement and settlement. This has consequently led to a surge in local prices and driven inflation rates as high as 600%.