Transferring an existing domain name involves switching the registrar that handles the registration service, so after the transfer itself, you’ll have to manage things like renewal payments or DNS resource record updates through the new registrar company. The transfer process itself 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 name entails a few necessary steps and one of them is unlocking the domain. The domain lock is a security feature, which is being adopted by more and more domain registry organizations. It’s a standard feature supported by all generic top-level domain names. If a domain name is locked, it will be impossible 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 is registered and all new domains that support this functionality are locked by default when they are registered.