Transferring an active domain name involves changing the registrar company that handles the domain registration service, so after the transfer itself, you will have to manage things like renewal payments or DNS entry updates through the new registrar. The transfer process itself is standard with most generic and country-code TLD extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and involve different procedures, but in the general case transferring a domain involves several basic steps and one of them is unlocking the domain. The lock is a safety option, which is being adopted by more and more domain registry operators. It’s a standard feature supported by all generic Top-Level Domains. If a domain is locked, it will be impossible to initiate a transfer process, so no one can even attempt to steal your domain name. The lock can be removed only through the account where the domain is registered in the first place and all new domain names that support this functionality are locked by default the moment they are registered.