Transferring an active domain involves changing the registrar company that provides the registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS resource record updates through the new domain name registrar. The transfer process itself is standard with most generic and country-code 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 name. The lock is a safety option, which is being adopted by more and more registry operators. It’s a default feature supported by all generic Top-Level Domains. If a domain name is locked, it will not be possible to initiate a transfer process, so nobody can even attempt to snatch your domain. The lock can be removed only through the account where the domain is registered and all new domain names that support this feature are locked by default the moment they are registered.