Transferring an existing domain entails switching the registrar that handles the registration service, so after the transfer itself, you’ll have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS entry updates through the new registrar company. The transfer procedure is standard with most universal and country-specific Top-Level Domain extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and involve different procedures, but in the general case transferring a domain entails a few necessary steps and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The lock is a safety option, which is being adopted by more and more registry operators. It is a standard feature supported by all gTLDs. If a domain name is locked, it will not be possible to start a transfer procedure, so nobody can even attempt to register your domain. The domain lock can be removed only through the account where the domain name is registered and all new domain names that support this feature are locked by default the moment they are registered.