Monetary processes in the world economy following the end of the Bretton Woods System

July 2024 marked the 80th anniversary of the creation of the Bretton Woods System (BWS). Its implementation proved to be the milestone for the history of the international monetary system, as it offered a giant step toward fiat money. This anniversary presents a good opportunity to assess its impact on the further sequence of events in the international monetary system. The BWS was far from being flawless. However, its imperfections offered strong incentives to search for new solutions aimed at making the entire system operate more smoothly. Subsequently, there can be talk about the intellectual heritage of the BWS and its impact on the most recent history in the area of the external use of money. The aim of this paper is to review this heritage by focusing above all on the years which followed its demise in the early 1970s until the early 2020s.