Transferring an already registered domain involves switching the registrar company that provides the registration service, so after the transfer itself, you will have to manage things like renewal payments or DNS entry modifications through the new registrar company. The transfer process itself is standard with most top-level domain name 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 lock is a security option, which is being adopted by more and more registry organizations. It’s a default feature supported by all gTLDs. If a domain is locked, it won’t be possible to initiate a transfer procedure, so no one can even attempt to take your domain name. The domain lock can be removed only through the account where the domain name is registered in the first place and all new domain names that support this functionality are locked by default when they are registered.